About the only certainty left is in the way they increase risks to an organisation in terms of business continuity. Risks that you have to manage in a recession-free environment, that range from IT failures to natural disasters, will still be present if recession arrives. It’s the new risks that you’ll also need to be aware of, and for which you’ll need to plan. To complicate matters, some are less obvious because they affect your organisation indirectly via their impact on partners and suppliers.
Archive for the ‘Business Continuity’ Category
Minimising the impact of recession on how well you recover
Monday, December 12th, 2011Business continuity statistics or scaremongering?
Friday, December 9th, 2011Business continuity numbers can be impressive: $200 billion for damages caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including the disruption to businesses because of destruction of facilities and displaced employees. Then there are the fabled “60-70-80%” statistics that typically look something like this: “70% of companies go out of business after a major data loss”. Yet there are two problems with these numbers. Impressive though blackouts and hurricanes may be, they can’t account for all business interruption. (more…)
Benchmarking and business continuity
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011Benchmarking business continuity means different things to different people, judging by the variety of information available. In one case, the standard by which comparisons are to be made is based on how many organisations (manufacturers and service providers) think their BC plan covers their supply chain risks. Opinions are subjective and no guarantee of results. Yet if organisations looked at how supply chains themselves have developed an approach to benchmarking, they might find a better model to adopt for benchmarking their BCM.
Metrics, red flags and reality
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011Business continuity has its challenges and finding the right metrics is one of them. The difficulty is in accepting that metrics need to show there are problems or unsatisfactory performance, at least from time to time. It’s tempting to wish for an array of indicators that always show a positive result. The fact is that the longer there are no red flags, the further away you are moving from BC reality. Red flags, like microbes and cold germs for humans, are a necessary part of making an organisation more robust and better equipped to deal with threats to its continuity. (more…)
Business Continuity Management indicators – leading or lagging?
Thursday, November 24th, 2011In business continuity management, you need to know how well you’re doing. In fact both BCM and disaster recovery need their indicators, just like the rest of the management sectors, whether for finance, production, logistics or any other domain. In a world where KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a watchword, and the accepted rule is “what gets measured, gets managed”, it’s clear that the right measurements can help in effective management. However, if BCM is designed to keep things running, whereas DR is destined to be applied when they stop running, do they necessarily need the same type of indicators? (more…)
Bankable Business Continuity
Monday, November 21st, 2011What does business continuity suffer from most? According to a number of Business Continuity Managers, it’s not a lack of methodology or solutions – it’s a lack of senior management attention. Because business continuity is often seen as a cost in terms of both time and money, it may be assigned a correspondingly lower priority by company and board directors, especially if so far the organization has not suffered any notable business discontinuity. For that reason, it’s always of interest to see cases where BC managers have been able to present business continuity as an opportunity to either generate profits or cut costs, including one case in particular from the world of finance. (more…)
Business continuity in the supply chain
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011With outsourcing now firmly on the agenda of so many organisations, business continuity in the supply chain is an additional challenge that has to be met. It’s not the same challenge as BC within the organisation, because visibility and transparency of a third-party’s BC management may not be readily available. The common pitfall is for example in accepting an outside supplier’s affirmation of having business continuity planning in place without making any further checks. Yet the smaller, leaner businesses supplying just one key product to an organisation are often themselves more exposed to incidents that the customers they supply. Knowing how to verify supplier BCM is critical. (more…)
Innovation in business continuity plans
Friday, November 11th, 2011Innovation in business continuity doesn’t always have to be technological, as one award-winning approach to a business continuity plan has shown. Sometimes the real innovation is simply in the point of view – the “how” of business continuity, instead of the “what”. That was what the New South Wales Police Force revolutionized to win the Australian Business Award for Innovation in 2008, winning organisations being “those that display exceptional leadership in their industry, and are role models for other organisations seeking business and product excellence”. A BC framework is essential to a police force as an emergency service; what is unique about the one used by the NSW Police Force is that instead of being driven by incidents, it is determined by consequences. (more…)
Business Continuity After Customer Collapse
Friday, November 4th, 2011Disaster recovery and business continuity are often thought of in terms of floods, fires, explosions and similar physical events. What may be less obvious to BC planners but just as critical to the survival of an organisation are the non-physical events, such as the loss of a major customer or a major change in a company’s stakeholders. The collapse of the global financial services firm Lehman Brothers was a case in point. At the same time, the company was a major customer of the Euroclear Bank and a major stakeholder of the then fifth largest hedge fund in the US, D. E. Shaw & Co. Luckily Euroclear had already planned for the event. (more…)
Business Continuity Good Practice Guidelines 2010
Monday, October 31st, 2011The business continuity good practice guidelines 2010 were defined by the Business Continuity Institute as an update to BC planning and practice. The fundamental model maintained the six phases of the BCM lifecycle. What changed was the flavour of the guidelines compared to earlier versions. (more…)
Business continuity and alternate site location
Friday, October 28th, 2011Business continuity and alternate site decisions involve a number of possible trade-offs. Depending on the budget to be made available or the flexibility possible in recovering operations for different sites, an alternate site policy can differ from one case to another. (more…)
Moving towards a business case for business continuity
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011Making the business case for business continuity is an area that companies struggle with. Whereas fires and explosions can have people’s imaginations working feverishly, when a little time goes by and they don’t happen, they get relegated to a “to do” list that might get done by the IT department, but not by others. (more…)
Virtualisation and Disaster Recovery
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011Virtualisation may not have all the answers when it comes to disaster recovery, but it can do things that basic tape or online back-ups cannot. It makes it easier to accomplish the three mandatory parts of a successful recovery: restoration of the data, the application using the data and the operating system required to make the application work. Tape or online back-ups may give you your data back, but if the servers have gone, then applications need to be installed all over again – and so do the operating systems with their passwords, permissions and configuration specific to the company concerned. (more…)
The telecommunications industry and business continuity
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011The National Emergency Communications Plan drawn up by the US Government in 2008 makes interesting reading. In its introductory section, it states that “during the last three decades, the nation has witnessed how inadequate emergency communications capabilities can adversely affect response and recovery efforts”.
Disaster recovery and the domino effect
Monday, October 17th, 2011The emphasis in recent times in BC/DR planning has been on getting rid of the “silo” effect – the blinkered thinking that only takes into account one department at a time. By recognising that isolated business risk does not exist, enterprises have made progress in adapting their disaster recovery planning for company-wide coverage, with less and less of the fiefdom mentality. What is less clear is the degree to which organisations have also thought about the “domino” effect; instead of one risk with simultaneous multiple impacts, the domino effect concerns a risk with a particular impact that exposes another part of the organisation to a second risk and impact, leading to a third and so on.