The 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”.
Posts Tagged ‘Business Continuity Exercising’
The telecommunications industry and business continuity
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011Business Continuity – Is your business ‘Recovery Ready’?
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010Do you know the answers to these questions for your organisation?
1. How would we continue to function in an extended building evacuation such as a power outage or flood in the basement?
2. Who are our most critical customers and how would we contact them?
3. What is our current IT Disaster Recovery capability? How long would it take to restore our most critical systems, applications and data?
4. Do we outsource critical business functions to third party organisations services? What if they were to fail.
5. Do our staff know how to get out of our building safely, where to go, and how do we account for them?
6. In the event of a disaster, would we need to implement manual workarounds to cater for reduced staff numbers, loss of IT systems, or denial of access to our building?
OpsCentre recommends undertaking a Readiness Assessment to identify where you are exposed and the possible impacts. If you would like assistance with evaluating the health of your business continuity program, we would be happy to assist. Don’t forget we are offering a complimentary initial consultation from which you will receive an ‘actionable’ health check report.
Click here for more information about the OpsCentre complimentary consultation.
Business Continuity Testing Isn’t a Pass or Fail Exercise
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) need to be regularly tested and updated to ensure accuracy and effective recovery in the event of a disruption.
Testing (sometimes referred to as Exercising) shouldn’t be viewed as a Pass or Fail exercise as every test is an opportunity to find potential problems with your plan and to have an opportunity to rectify them.
We view testing as an opportunity to continually evolve not only the strategy and plan documents themselves but to build the competence of the key staff members involved. A regular BCP test will help to embed the skills required to effectively manage a business interruption.
Once you’ve mastered the basics of testing your business continuity plan, put your strategy to the test by seeing if it can hold up in a variety of circumstances. It also helps to engage the interest of the business continuity team members if the test scenarios are dynamic and evolving.
Some ideas on how to keep your testing fresh and continually improving are to try some different ‘incidents’ such as a catastrophic loss of premises, extended power failure resulting in denial of access to building or loss of significant staff due to a pandemic.
Other ways to put your plan through its paces is to throw in a complication such as the unavailability or loss of a key recovery staff member Eg. The IT Recovery Co-ordinator or the Command Team Leader. Other complications could include, mobile phone telecommunications being unavailable.
A robust business continuity plan and the business continuity team should be able to respond to these challenges.
Most importantly, to ensure you are getting value out of your testing process, ensure someone is assigned the responsibility for noting down issues and action items for rectification arising from the test and for following up to make sure they are completed.