GitLab, by its remote-only nature, is not easily affected by typical causes of business disruption, such as local failures of equipment, power supplies, telecommunications, social unrest, terrorist attacks, fire, or natural disasters.
In case of an all-remote company like GitLab, it is sufficient to have simple contingency plans in the form of service-level agreements with companies that host our data and services. The advantage of an all-remote workforce like GitLab is that if there are clusters of people or systems that are unavailable, the rest of the company will continue to operate normally.
The exception to this would be a scenario of a single point of failure, (for example, if one of the Engineering heads who should sign off on triggering the plan is unavailable due to a disaster). In this case we would need an alternate plan in place that covers how to get in contact with the person or people affected by the disaster and trigger this business continuity plan.
RTO and RPO are two of the most important parameters of a Business Continuity Plan. These are objectives to guide GitLab Infrastructure team in choosing the optimal data backup plan. The RTO/RPO provides the basis for identifying and analyzing viable strategies for inclusion in the business continuity plan. Viable strategy options include any which would enable resumption of a business process in a time frame within the RPO/RTO.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds the Business Continuity Plan’s maximum allowable threshold.
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time a service level or business process must be restored after a disaster, in order to avoid risks associated with a break in continuity.
For a business continuity plan to be effective, it needs to be triggered as soon as possible; too early or late can reduce its efficacy. Key decision points to consider when a BCP has to be triggered or invoked are given below:
This section provides details about the production environment that must be available for GitLab.com to run effectively:
GitLab.com is hosted on Google cloud platform, customers.gitlab.com is in Azure and license.gitlab.com is in AWS. Since Customers and Licenses are hosted on different providers, they are unlikely to be unavailable when/if GitLab.com is down; the converse of this can also be true.
Priority::1: Outage would have immediate impact on GitLab customer/user operations
P2: Outage would have immediate impact on GitLab ability to continue business Malicious Software attack and hacking or other Internet attacks.
P3: Outage greater than 72 hours would have impact on GitLab ability to continue to do business Disruption of service from Salesforce.com, Zuora, NetSuite, Google Workspace
P4: Non critical system Disruption of service from TripActions or internal chat tool (Slack).
When it comes to a disaster, communication is of the essence. A plan is essential because it puts all team-members on the same page and clearly outlines all communication. Documents should all have updated team-member contact information and team-members should understand exactly what their role is, in the days following the triggering of the BC plan. Assignments like setting up workstations, assessing damage, redirecting phones and other tasks will need assignments if you don’t have some sort of technical resource to help you sort through everything.
Each GitLab team should be trained and ready to deploy in the event of a disruptive situation requiring plan activation. The plan of action steps, procedures, and guidelines will be documented in their team runbooks page (currently under development) and should be available offline. This should have detailed steps on recovery capabilities, and instructions on how to return the system to normal operations.
More details on this will be covered in the BC plan - roles & responsibilities section which is in development.
Make sure that backups are performed daily, and include running an additional full local backup on all servers and data in the Business Continuity preparation plan. Run them as far in advance as possible tp ensure that they’re backed up to a location that will not be impacted by the disaster. Alternate storage provisioning.
A plan cannot be successful without restoring customer confidence. As a final step, ensure that there is a detailed vendor communication plan as part of the Business continuity preparation plan. This plan will check for all the systems and services to ensure normal operations have resumed as intended once the damage is repaired in the area. Also, include the section to check with the main service providers on restoration and access.
After formalizing the business continuity plan, or BCP, the next important step is to test the plan. Testing verifies the effectiveness of the plan, trains plan participants on what to do in a real scenario, and identifies areas where the plan needs to be strengthened. A test of the plan review, has to be conducted at least annually.
GitLab's first test of the business continuity plan was performed in April 2020 and tests will be conducted at least annually or when significant business changes occur.
Testing can present a lot of challenges. It requires investing time and resources. With that in mind, to start with, it may make more sense to conduct a tabletop test at a conference room, rather than involving the entire organization in a full-blown drill. Also an initial "dry run" of the plan can be performed, by conducting a structured walk-through test of the approved BC plan. The initial testing is done in sections and after normal business hours to minimize disruptions. Subsequent tests can occur during normal business hours. An actual test-run can be performed eventually. Based on the gaps and weaknesses learnt from the testing, underlying problems should be corrected and the plan updated accordingly. The various types of tests that can be conducted include: checklist tests, simulation tests, parallel tests, and full interruption tests Not testing the plan, will put both the business and customer confidence at risk.
There are several types of tests, such as a plan review, a tabletop test, or a simulation test, which was detailed in the previous section. Some testing scenarios that can be performed, are given below:
Data Loss/Breach
Data Recovery Testing
Emergency Communication
The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is developed as part of the Business Continuity Plan process.
The purpose of the BIA is to identify and prioritize system components by correlating them to mission critical processes that support the functioning of GitLab. Using this information to characterize what would be the impact to GitLab, if any of these systems were to be unavailable.
Determine data classification and approved operating System usage: GitLab data and system resources can more clearly be linked to mission critical business processes by way of classifying them based on sensitivity. These priority levels can be established for sequencing recovery activities and resources. Additionally, the existence of an approved set of operating systems platforms will facilitate ease of management and quick turnaround and repair when they are non-functional.
Determine mission critical business processes and recovery criticality: In this step, GitLab’s mission critical business processes / systems are identified and the impact of a system disruption to those processes is determined along with outage impacts and estimated downtime. The downtime reflects the maximum, that an organization can tolerate while still maintaining the mission.
Identify resource requirements: Realistic recovery efforts require a thorough evaluation of the resources required to resume business processes and related interdependencies as quickly as possible. Examples of resources that should be identified include software, data files, system components, and vital records.
Determine alternate storage and strategies: Identify any alternate strategies in place to meet expected RTOs. This includes backup or spare equipment and vendor support contracts.GitLab alternate storage process, serves to securely store data in an alternate location from source data
Identify recovery priorities for system resources based on standards: Adherence to GitLab's agreed upon RTO/ RPO: Apart from determining the RTO and RPO, BIA also defines Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)
Delegation and defining the process: Designate each incident as critical or non-critical based on the business priority. Compile a list of personnel who must be in place to perform these functions. In times of an occurrence of an incident, a detailed step-by-step approach about how to communicate it to the group, how it is performed, who performs it, and the operational mode of action taken.
The following links show the process carried out at GitLab to cater to this requirement:
The most important part of the Business Impact Analysis is to weigh the exactness of all findings. Communicate the findings to the respective department managers or key personnel to ensure that the assumptions made are in fact accurate and realistic. Once the accuracy of the documented findings has been established and agreed to by all parties, these BIA findings are submitted to GitLab's e-group for approval.
The BIA report will be updated based on changes to the organization, information system, or environment of operation and problems encountered during the implementation, execution, or testing. This plan will be protected from unauthorized disclosure and modification. Finally, all the Business Impact Analysis data will be stored in a safe place for future reference in the event of a disaster.
