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February 6th, 2012
Pandemics are good material for Hollywood disaster films. They also feature in various disaster recovery planning documents issued by governments as advice, or by private sector organisations as disaster recovery plans. In true Hollywood style, projected pandemics are often almost too big to be believable. That makes them great subjects of conversation at the coffee machine, while public health organisations spend considerable amounts of time and money estimating impacts and stockpiling remedies. What is less obvious is whether we’ve recognised that the pandemics with overall bigger impacts may not be the disaster-movie variety at all.
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Tags: Business Continuity Plans, IT Disaster Recovery Planning, Pandemic, Pandemic Plan, Risk Management
Posted in Business Continuity, Business Resilience, Pandemic | No Comments »
February 2nd, 2012
Interference has negative connotations, and a business continuity consultant should bring something positive, not negative, to an organisation. However, if an organisation is to derive any benefit from the services of a BC consultant, there has to be change at some level. Change has to be driven or at least guided. Change is disruptive by definition. The question that organisations sometimes ask, “Will these consulting methods interfere with what we currently do?”, really has to be another question: “How can these consulting methods bring something that is not seen as interference, but as positive change?”
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Tags: Business Continuity Consultants, change management
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January 29th, 2012
“Putting your money where your mouth is” is as true of business continuity planning as of anything else. Government agencies often set an example in this respect, making their BC plans readily available and free of charge. That doesn’t mean that there’s no need for constructive criticism. Some of the plans are well thought-out and comprehensive, while others may have “underdeveloped strengths” (meaning apparent weaknesses or omissions). So it’s interesting to see a private-sector company like IT networking vendor Cisco also making information on its BC planning public and the points it emphasises.
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Tags: Business Continuity Planning
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January 25th, 2012
Small and medium businesses often rely on being nimble enough in the market to compete with big businesses. A “disaster recovery plan template for SMBs” would ideally take that into account, covering all the different aspects of such businesses, while remaining concise enough to facilitate updates as business configurations change with market conditions. The trouble is that templates as generally applicable are unlikely to both effective and efficient at the same time. Perhaps the following “3P principle” could help put you put your own more manageable template in place.
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Tags: disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery plan template, smb
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January 23rd, 2012
“Learn from your mistakes” is a good motto and business continuity plans are no exception. In the previous post, “Disaster Recovery Plan – the Map is Not the Territory”, we described how ASCDI (Association of Service and Computer Dealers International) found out that in a hurricane its disaster recovery plan was less than perfect. The experience is described by Joseph Marion on the ASCDI website as “humbling”. However, it’s also thanks to honest accounts like this that BC planning continues to develop and that other organisations get the chance to avoid similar pitfalls. Some of the practical lessons learned by ASCDI are below.
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Tags: Business Continuity Plan, Disaster Recovery
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January 20th, 2012
Although it’s encouraging to hear about perfect disaster recovery plans and outstanding recoveries, it’s also refreshing from time to time to hear about frank accounts of recoveries that weren’t so perfect. This isn’t for gloating. It’s for tempering optimism with reality and remembering that “the map is not the territory”. In other words, what you think might happen and what really happens are not necessarily the same things. Here’s what flummoxed ASCDI (Association of Service and Computer Dealers International), a worldwide association based in Florida.
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Tags: disaster recovery events, disaster recovery plan
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January 17th, 2012
Of course, what we really mean is rightsizing the services a business continuity consultant can provide. How much or how little an organisation decides to involve an external consultant will depend on the extent of business continuity planning needs, and how that organisation is set up to handle them. Ideally, you’ll leverage the involvement of a business continuity consultant to get the most benefit for the least outlay, keeping the decision-making process flexible according to needs and resources. However, there’s one situation where you’ll often get more “bang for your buck” by bringing in a consultant.
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Tags: BCP, Business Continuity Consultant, Business Continuity Consultants, Business Continuity Consulting
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January 16th, 2012
How often should you test or ‘exercise’ your business continuity plan? How long is a piece of string? The answer to both questions is of course – it depends. It depends on the nature of your business, the rate of change in your activity and your industry sector and whether or not you’ve had to put your business continuity plan into action in the recent past. It’s interesting to see different recommendations come to light: “once a year”; “once every six months”; “once every three years”, and so on. Yet for many companies, there’s an even more basic question to be answered.
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Tags: Business Continuity Plan, business continuity plan test, exercise, How Often Should A Business Continuity Plan Be Tested
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January 4th, 2012
Business continuity management might be defined as “doing things right” in business continuity. Leadership on the other hand is doing the right things. In a world where businesses and threats to businesses change rapidly, management in a general sense isn’t sufficient. Unless someone carries the torch of leadership, any organisation is ultimately doomed because it won’t adapt. And as they say, adapt or die. Leadership in business continuity is no exception. In fact, for several reasons, it’s even more important. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity Management, Leadership
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December 27th, 2011
Sometimes you have to be pragmatic. While it would be great to have the business case for business continuity generally agreed in an organisation, it’s not always that simple. So if there’s an opportunity for business continuity to get into a business on the coattails of some other project, it may merit consideration.
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Tags: Business Case, Business Continuity, Virtualisation, VMWare
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December 21st, 2011
Metrics are what you use to measure things. It sounds obvious. What’s not so obvious is why figure-driven metrics seem so often to be channelled off towards disaster recovery and IT in particular, whereas other high-level metrics end up with business continuity. Sure, there are the historical IT roots of disaster recovery to be considered compared to those of business continuity, but in theory we’ve evolved since then. Are we face to face with a phenomenon of, well, “metricism” – our term to express unjustified discrimination in the way metrics are used? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity Planning, disaster recovery planning, measurement, metrics, Risk Management
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December 20th, 2011
Disaster recovery plans are like car insurance. It’s not because you’ve insured your car that you’re obliged to have an accident; similarly, it’s not because you have a great disaster recovery plan, that you’re obliged to have a disaster. Although reactive disaster recovery will always be a counterpart to proactive business continuity, better driving will also mean fewer accidents, so to speak. The more you can do in business continuity and the less you have to do in disaster recovery, the better.
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Tags: Business Continuity Plan, Business Continuity Planning, disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery planning
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December 12th, 2011
The difference between DR and BC often depends on the person you’re talking to. It’s one of those grey areas, where definitions are sometimes arbitrary and no universal standard definition exists. The two terms not only evoke different meanings, but provoke different reactions in organisational management. Disaster recovery may be largely ignored because “disaster” is such an extreme and improbable concept. Business continuity is easier to grapple with its suggestion of different degrees of keeping your business going: anything from upgrading a server, to replacing a key VP on maternity leave, to handling an impending hurricane. Yet, there’s a least one simple way to resolve the matter.
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Tags: Business Continuity, difference business continuity disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery
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December 12th, 2011
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your planning… We discussed the relationship between disaster recovery and business continuity in another post, but this time the subject is the dividing line between emergency management and business continuity. In fact, we’re back to the same question: how do you carve up everything that needs to be planned, tested and executed in order for an organisation to “keep a lickin’ and keep on tickin’” (one of our favourite quotes!). Moreover, from this question comes another one that is just as important.
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Tags: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Management, Emergency Plans
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December 12th, 2011
In theory, disaster recovery like its counterpart business continuity needs to concentrate on what is critical in an organisation to keep it functioning correctly, and concentrate on planning for and managing those aspects. Experience plays a large part in understanding how far to go, and having broad knowledge gained by working in or with the various operations of a company can be invaluable. Otherwise plans can become too elaborate and too costly compared to the general level of business risk that applies to an organisation. Yet, how much disaster recovery is too much?
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Tags: Disaster Recovery, disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery planning, Risk Management
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