Business Continuity (BCMS)

1. Continuity as a National Operating Requirement

For St. Vincent and the Grenadines, business continuity is not a technical preference or an IT policy. It is a national operating requirement.

As a Small Island Developing State located in a high-risk disaster zone, the State must assume that physical infrastructure, office buildings, and local systems will periodically fail. Hurricanes, volcanic activity, extended power loss, supply chain disruption, and cyber incidents are not edge cases — they are planning assumptions.

In such conditions, government legitimacy is sustained not by perfection, but by continued function.

This BCMS establishes continuity as a first-class design constraint of the national digital platform. Systems are not considered complete unless their behavior under disruption is clearly defined, tested, and governed.

2. Data Permanence and the Concept of the Digital State

The foundation of continuity is data permanence.

Policy Statement

• Government records derive their legal authority from the State, not from paper, buildings, or local storage.
• Authoritative data must exist independently of any single physical location or facility.

Implementation Principle

All critical government data — identity, civil status, property, finance, and official correspondence — must be continuously replicated to geographically independent, secure environments outside the immediate disaster radius.

This establishes what can be described as a Digital State Memory: a persistent, location-independent representation of government authority and records.

This is not a convenience feature. It is the mechanism by which the State continues to exist administratively even when physical facilities do not.

3. Architecture Designed for Failure, Not Optimism

The digital architecture defined in this blueprint supports continuity through assumed failure, not ideal conditions.

Infrastructure Independence

Core systems are designed to operate without reliance on government-owned server rooms, local power stability, or single-network connectivity.

In practice this means:

• Cloud-native, managed infrastructure
• Stateless frontends accessible via low-bandwidth connections
• Identity and access systems reachable from outside national facilities

Outcome: Loss of a building, office, or data center does not equate to loss of government function.

Recovery Expectations (Not Aspirations)

Continuity targets are explicitly defined and enforced:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Near-zero for Tier 0 services
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Minimal data loss via continuous replication and point-in-time recovery

Manual recovery procedures, tape backups, or multi-day restoration windows are not acceptable for critical services.

4. Operational Continuity States

Rather than pretending systems are always fully available, the BCMS defines explicit operating states.

State	Name	Description	Availability
C1	Normal Operations	Full functionality under stable conditions	Full Services
C2	Degraded Operations	Disaster or infrastructure stress. Interfaces simplify, bandwidth usage is minimized	Core Services Only
C3	Emergency Operations	Severe disruption. Digital systems support coordination and visibility only	Alerts, Status, Messaging

Each system must declare:

• Which services remain available at each state
• How transitions are triggered
• Who has authority to declare and exit states

Ambiguity during failure is treated as a governance failure.

5. Continuity Through Operational Fallback (Not Offline Sync)

This blueprint explicitly rejects offline-first synchronization as a baseline requirement for government systems.

Rationale

Offline sync systems:

• Are complex to implement correctly
• Fail silently when poorly designed
• Require sustained, high-skill engineering teams
• Create long-tail data integrity and legal risks

Given procurement realities, vendor churn, and limited specialist capacity, these risks outweigh their benefits.

Approved Continuity Mechanism

In severe outages, continuity is achieved through:

• Paper-based procedures, using pre-approved forms and manuals
• Manual service delivery, authorized under emergency declarations
• Mandatory post-incident reconciliation into digital systems

Paper is treated as:

• Temporary
• Controlled
• Auditable
• Inferior, but reliable

This approach ensures that failures are visible and local, rather than silent and systemic.

6. Emergency Operating Capability (“Government Without Buildings”)

Critical ministries maintain the ability to operate without access to permanent offices.

This includes:

• Secure, browser-based systems
• Multi-factor identity access
• Connectivity via mobile networks, satellite, or external facilities
• Portable equipment issued selectively based on role criticality

The objective is not mobility for its own sake, but institutional continuity independent of geography.

7. Strategic Outcome

This BCMS shifts the State from disaster recovery to disaster tolerance.

Government continuity is no longer dependent on:

• Specific buildings
• Individual vendors
• Local infrastructure
• Heroic technical intervention

Instead, continuity becomes a predictable, testable property of the system itself.

When disruption occurs, government does not disappear. It degrades gracefully, remains accountable, and recovers without confusion.