Crisis and Business Continuity Policy

1. Purpose

To explain what we do today, and what is still missing, to keep hangel's critical services running or restore them as quickly as possible in situations such as service outages, data loss, security incidents, natural disasters or reputational crises.

2. Scope

The hangel platform and its critical services: sign-in, emergency blood requests, disaster and emergency announcements, event QR check-in and records of transfers to NGOs. The Association's communication and decision processes.

3. Principles

1. Personal safety first. In an outage, life-critical flows are restored first.
2. Data integrity first. Health and financial data are protected from corruption.
3. Open communication. Affected users and organisations are told honestly what is happening.
4. Learning lessons. After every significant incident, what happened, why it happened and what will change are written down.

4. Roles and responsibilities

• Board of Directors: takes decisions during a crisis and approves external communication.
• Technical lead: restores the service and carries out restoration from backup.
• Data protection contact: starts the Data Breach Response Policy if personal data is involved.

5. How it works at hangel today

• Cloud infrastructure: The database runs multi-regionally in Europe (eur3: Belgium and the Netherlands); we have no server room of our own.
• Backups: Daily automatic backups of the database are kept for 98 days. Super-admins can also download a collection-based JSON backup from the panel (limited per collection; file storage not included).
• Monitoring: Errors are monitored with Sentry; a request is sent to the application server's health endpoint every 5 minutes and the result is logged.
• Data breaches: There is a written set of response steps for personal data breaches and breach records in the super-admin panel (Data Breach Response Policy).
• Disaster tools (for users): The platform offers disaster and emergency announcements, an emergency page that warns when the internet connection is lost and, on iOS, a disaster radio. These are crisis tools for users; they do not replace a business continuity plan for hangel itself.

6. Not yet in place and our goals

• There is no written, approved business continuity plan; recovery time (RTO) and acceptable data loss (RPO) have not been defined for critical services.
• A documented restore-from-backup test has not been carried out; point-in-time recovery (PITR) is off; database delete protection is off.
• No separate backup set-up for files in file storage (photos, documents) has been documented.
• There is no deputy and access hand-over plan for key-person dependency (small team).
• There is no status page to inform users during an outage.
• No prepared crisis communication texts or spokesperson have been set.

7. How to raise a concern

Reports of an outage or possible security incident: info@hangel.org. Suspected personal data breach: kvkk@hangel.org.

8. Review

At least once a year and after every significant outage or incident.

9. Related documents

Risk Management Policy · Data Breach Response Policy · Information Security Policy · Media and Press Policy · Existing "ISO 22301 Status and Roadmap Statement" and "Disaster Recovery and Backup Testing Statement"