business continuity — even more important now than ever

If you’re in an organisation that has a mature outlook on risk with robust business processes including succession planning and a capability to operate without core IT systems in contingent workplaces then congratulations, please don’t read any further!

Oh… still here?

The first paragraph is essentially describing (in simple terms) Business Continuity and it’s quite often the poor relation of Disaster Recovery (DR) even though there’s a clue in the name — it is an ongoing exercise to ensure that an organisation has the ability to function at a reduced capability for an agreed amount of time should an event occur. It’s much wider in scope than DR which is generally used to define how you recover from systems outages (I define a system as all of the technological components required to SUPPORT a business process — from power, network and comms, hardware, etc through to end user devices) as it also has to include people, processes, procedures, HR, public relations and the supply chain

One of my favourite quotes is that, in general, technology is an enabler to running an organisation, not the other way round. You can have the most resilient systems in the World but if 40% of your staff are struck down with pandemic flu, your offices get flooded, mass transit services are hit with a major outage, etc, what is the effect on your organisation?

But these are all held in our risk registers, right?

Of course they SHOULD be but let’s be honest — how dynamic are your risk registers? Not only should all your risks be assessed and updated regularly the risks that could have a detrimental affect to an organisation’s ability to operate MUST have a plan that is owned and operated at the highest levels which is executed regularly with the outcomes being used to improve the ability and capability to overcome those threats

If you’re wondering how worthwhile an exercise this is you could always go onto your favourite search engine and scare yourself silly — there are plenty of articles and quotes that tell you that “80% of organisations that experience a prolonged disaster go out of business within 5 years” or “30% of companies that experience a major fire go out of business within a year”. One statistic is that, on average, a company would lose 25 percent of its daily revenue after the sixth day of its system breakdown, while this figure is closer to 40 percent for the financial, banking and public utility industries.

So — time to dust off your organisation’s Business Continuity plan?