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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News
Rightsizing Your Business Continuity Consultant
January 17th, 2012How Often Should A Business Continuity Plan Be Tested?
January 16th, 2012How 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.
Business Continuity Management or Leadership?
January 4th, 2012Business 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 »
Getting BC In Through The Virtualisation Back Door
December 27th, 2011Sometimes 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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Primary Metrics For Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity
December 21st, 2011Metrics 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 »
Morphing DR Plans Into BC plans
December 20th, 2011Disaster 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.
The Difference Between Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity
December 12th, 2011The 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.
Where Does Emergency Management Stop And Business Continuity Start?
December 12th, 2011Just 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.
The Danger Of Disaster Recovery Overkill
December 12th, 2011In 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?
Minimising the impact of recession on how well you recover
December 12th, 2011About 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.
Business continuity statistics or scaremongering?
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Benchmarking and business continuity
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
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Disaster recovery template mania?
November 28th, 2011A 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 »
Business Continuity Management indicators – leading or lagging?
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? Read the rest of this entry »