* Getting your company and people back up and running after a disaster
My job as an analyst often has me looking into the future and trying to make some sense for my clients about what the vendors ought to provide and what the IT managers ought to consider baking in to their long-term IT strategy. Futurethink is often a tough thing to do with much accuracy, but as few clients seem inclined to pay me to predict the past, well, I do what I must.
My job as an analyst often has me looking into the future and trying to make some sense for my clients about what the vendors ought to provide and what the IT managers ought to consider baking in to their long-term IT strategy. Futurethink is often a tough thing to do with much accuracy, but as few clients seem inclined to pay me to predict the past, well, I do what I must.
Last week’s column on disaster recovery drew attention to what are seemingly non-traditional IT responsibilities – such things as tracking down the non-IT staff in times of emergency, providing links between corporate employees and necessary services (social, and not just business-related), and so forth. It would seem that I have not been the only person thinking about such things.
Correspondent Steve, a solutions consultant in the United Kingdom, wrote to share the following regarding the “social issues” involved in business continuity planning:
“I see more companies in the [United Kingdom] moving to business continuity best practices based on the principles of the Business Continuity Institute [in the United Kingdom] and the Disaster Recovery Institute International [in the United States] … The requirements to optimize costs against risk exposures for an acceptable level of service delivery are married to an acceptance that a reduction in business capability is inevitable … for, perhaps, an extended period … There is a draft British Standard (BS25999) that … will compel many U.K. companies to adopt these practices.
“There is a new breed of business continuity-focused individuals within the IT community that looks to understand the holistic practices and business strategies so they can ensure IT solutions are optimized and aligned to the need.”
We often talk about what might happen if a company lost its data, but what if we reverse this traditional worry – what about data that has “lost its company?”
Consider the scenario of a company that has just gone through a hurricane. On the positive side, the data is all safe at the remote failover site; on the negative, the company headquarters itself has been destroyed, the regional power grid has failed and is likely to be down for several days, and many of the roads may be impassible. If this is a company conducting worldwide business, how would it maintain its position in a worldwide market in the face of this severe, localized disaster?
Given such a problem – a scenario wherein your data is safe but almost nothing else is – how would your company cope?
Consider such things as employee tracking, extending non-business-related services to employees and their families in times of emergency, establishing off-site points of computing presence in case key office facilities go away – in fact, anything that might conceivably become part of the corporate responsibility. Would your company continue to thrive?
I would be very interested in finding out if your company is beginning to extend its disaster planning to include procedures for increased coverage of non-traditional areas of responsibility. As is always the case, if I publish anything on this topic in this newsletter or elsewhere, the privacy of all contributors and companies will be protected.
