Andara Business Continuity

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Andara University is located in an urban environment with seven other major universities within 4 miles of its campus and direct neighbors with one. It is a private catholic university that is home to nearly 4,000 students and roughly 1,000 faculty and staff. Andara has five colleges: Arts and Science, Business, Graduate and Professional Studies, Law and Music and Fine arts, with 59 undergrad programs and 11 graduate and professional programs2. The student-faculty ratio at Andara is 10:1 with most classes having fewer then 20 students. Many the students are from out of state and a small number are from other countries.
I chose to look at Andara University because it is a small institution that acts as its own community. The University must …show more content…

One way Andara University maintains business continuity is by pre-planning with faculty. Each year the Office of Emergency Management at Andara works with and encourages the faculty to create lessons on blackboard that can be used as back up in case of an evacuation or shelter in place emergency. This is to ensure continuity of classes and that the requirements are maintained for number of didactic classes throughout the year. Another way business continuity is maintained is by having back up plans in place for essential staff members, core functions and running drills for these plans each year. The university has a memorandum of understandings (MOU) agreement for a hot site located in Dallas Texas where their core staff would meet post evacuation. At this location, they would set up all essential functions and run their operations through an additional off-site backup server location (located in a different time zone). Once essential functions are up and running, and there is need, the university may bring in more staff to the hot site in Dallas. Since the coordinating staff will be localized it will be easier to communicate with each other and the campus community post disaster. Once they can reenter the city, facilities personnel will inspect each building and make sure it is up to code before anyone comes back to campus. By having these plans in place and everyone knowing exactly what is …show more content…

All the factors of resiliency were taken into strong consideration by the Office of Emergency Management at Andara, from thinking about the social well-being of their campus community in the simple things like being able to charge electronics and have that community center. To the political nature of the job and having to work so closely with the city and other departments and not always letting them do what they want because, it helps the economic well-being of the institution. All four of the factors are critical parts of resilience and at Andara University they do an excellent job on intertwining all of them in creating their resiliency policies and

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