We’re sometimes all too easily impressed by a few acronyms, like MTO, RTO and others in business continuity. It’s easy enough to find out what they mean, either from this site or elsewhere, but the real issue is whether that’s the point. Let’s explain. MTO stands for maximum tolerable outage, and RTO is for recovery time objective. The problem starts with the word “outage”: the notion of “working or not working”, “on or off”, “1 or 0”, and so on. Is DR being exposed to dangerous oversimplification?
Archive for February, 2012
MTO, RTO… How about MTD (Maximum Tolerable Degradation)?
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012Half-Price Business Continuity Plan
Monday, February 27th, 2012“I know someone who can do my business continuity plan for half the price.” The fact is, it’s probably true. In business, there’s always someone ready to offer a solution at a lower price. Some companies make a profit out of being the low cost supplier in a particular market. With economies of scale, they can push their operating costs down way below that of competitors and still make a reasonable margin on what they’re selling. So why doesn’t this work for services for business continuity plans?
Business Continuity and Alternate Site Distance
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012The pairing of business continuity and alternate sites has around for some time. Whether hot, warm, cold, mirrored or even mobile, the idea is to provide facilities for an organisation to continue to function, at least at a basic level, if disaster strikes normal operations. The question that arises is how close or how far such an alternate site should be located. There are good reasons for locating an alternate site close to an employees’ usual place of work, as there are also for moving it into a completely different geographical region. However, recent developments may mean that the distance discussion may be becoming less relevant.
Isn’t my Insurance the Only Business Continuity Plan I need?
Thursday, February 16th, 2012Is it or isn’t it? The first thing to understand is what really is covered by your insurance and how such insurance would be applied as part of your disaster recovery or business continuity plan. The mistake made by organisations, and small businesses in particular, is in assuming that their insurance covers everything. Insurance policies may include general coverage for different aspects of an organisation, but will not necessarily cover specific aspects that are vital to particular operations. They may be complex to read or expensive to buy, meaning decisions are either taken without sufficient consideration, or are continually put off till later. And that’s before getting to the question of how soon insurance claims will be met after a disaster.
Business Continuity Test Scenarios – the Game!
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012There’s nothing like making something fun to get people involved and interested, and the same applies to business continuity test scenarios. What makes them fun depends. For some, it’s the intellectual challenge of figuring out the right way to test scenarios to cover the right proportion of all the possible outcomes. For others, it’s a competition to see how well they can do in the face of a test situation that’s put to them. Satisfying both groups of people at the same time can be a challenge, but a recent online simulation game may indicate some possibilities for the future.
Business Continuity Management in Your Business DNA
Sunday, February 12th, 2012It’s fashionable to talk about business DNA. Often it’s another term for business culture, otherwise expressed as “the way we do things around here”. Using “DNA” instead of “culture” has the advantage of using an acronym with some “buzz” to it. Even if you don’t know exactly what DNA is or does, the basic concept of an internal blueprint that guides the growth and direction of an organism (or organisation) is simple enough to grasp, compared to the more nebulous notion of culture. So it would be advantageous to find ways of getting business continuity management into your business DNA.
The Challenge of Distributed Detail in Business Continuity Planning
Thursday, February 9th, 2012Much of the difficulty of effective business continuity planning lies in the fact that you need to make detailed plans for things not to happen, rather than just for things to happen. This means the strength of mind necessary for delving into the detail of scenarios that may never come up and simulating situations that may never arise. It also means the leadership qualities to attract and federate, from a business continuity point of view, followers across the whole organisation. It’s a challenge of “distributed detail” and it shows up in at least two key parts of the business continuity planning process.
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Pandemics and Business Continuity Plans
Monday, February 6th, 2012Pandemics 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.
Does a Business Continuity Consultant Interfere?
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012Interference 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?”
Would Business Continuity Awareness Week Benefit from Remarketing?
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012So Business Continuity Awareness Week 2012 came and went (in March, in fact). Sponsored by the BCI (Business Continuity Institute), this annual event brings together BC professionals and other interested parties for a week of events and presentations. However, the risk of emphasising a special week once a year is that people then think the pressure is off for the rest of the year. The BCI is aware of the issue; on the BCAW website, it points out that like “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas”, that BC awareness has to be a day-in, day-out exercise. The answer may be in some nifty viral marketing.
As a “product”, BCAW seems to push a number of the right buttons. The main theme this year was time, and the unspoken but possibly unjustified feeling of many organisations that they will be able to handle disaster if and when it happens, rather than taking the time upfront to prepare for business continuity. Other noteworthy aspects concerned the 2012 Olympics, supply chains, lean Six Sigma and even applying BCM to the global economic crisis, as well as the Internet Business Continuity Management game, called BC24. The trick is now to build up mindshare with persistency, so that people think about it more over the year, and not just within one week.
Compared to conventional publicity and advertising, BCAW lacks an effect of repetition. Advertisers also know that besides repeating their message, one of the most powerful levers to get inside prospective customer’s heads is to be approved and recommended by people to their friends and colleagues. Combining the two, so-called viral marketing uses information and even online gimmicks to get people to spread the word among themselves. The BCI already has BC24 (see paragraph above), which could be the basis of a fun yet educational gadget that people could then email to others.