News
December 12th, 2011
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.
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Tags: Business Continuity, Business Continuity Plan; Third Party Suppliers, Supply Chain
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December 9th, 2011
Business 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity
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December 6th, 2011
Benchmarking 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.
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Tags: Benchmarking, Business Continuity, RPO, RTO, Supply Chain
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November 30th, 2011
Business 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. Read the rest of this entry »
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November 28th, 2011
A disaster recovery template has its uses. If you’re stuck for ideas about how to lay out your DR plan or if you need a quick-fix solution until you can revisit it in depth, a template that covers the main points can be a boon. It’ll probably be generic, because templates have to be usable by different types of organisation. For that reason, it won’t necessarily provide answers about any specific aspects of your business, although it can help you to uncover them by asking you suitably worded questions. So it’s when DR templates start to become overly specific that a doubt may creep in. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Disaster Recovery Template
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November 24th, 2011
In 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? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity Management, Disaster Recovery, key performance indicators, measurement
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November 21st, 2011
What 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity
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November 16th, 2011
With 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, business continuity in the supply chain
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November 14th, 2011
Although tape still has advantages for high volume data back-up, not every organisation is properly equipped or structured to exploit those advantages. Small and medium businesses in particular may want alternatives to tape back-up if their IT department would rather put its resources, whether money or staff, into other projects than the management of an elaborate tape back-up solution. Any alternative needs to be competitive in terms of back-up capacity, cost and security. After all, the other aspect of interest for tape back-ups is the relative ease of removing tape cartridges to a separate location for archiving, providing security against incidents affecting the main data centre. There are however solutions that compete for as little as $50 or $60 per year.
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Tags: Alternatives to tape backup, Disaster Recovery
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November 11th, 2011
Innovation 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Business Continuity Plan
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November 7th, 2011
Ever since the second computer was attached to the first network, interdependency has grown. Servers depend on each other to provide vital services and applications are distributed over machines. Disaster recovery is not just a question of recovering a database, when servers also need name and directory services to find each other again across a network. The trap is to apply disaster recovery to the different IT components in isolation and to define aggressive recovery time objectives that fail to take into account the linkages between the components needed to make the whole system work. Already a puzzle for the IT department, interdependency is a challenge for other parts of the business too. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Disaster Recovery
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November 4th, 2011
Disaster 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business Continuity, Business Resilience, Customers, Supply Chain
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October 31st, 2011
The 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: BCM, Business Continuity, Business Continuity Institute, Good Practice Guidelines, GPG
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October 28th, 2011
Business 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Alternate Site, Business Continuity, Teleworking
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October 25th, 2011
Making 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: BCM, Business Case, Business Continuity, Business Continuity Planning
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