Author: Jim Mitchell

As part of its Resiliency program, one of our clients recently performed their Annual Disaster Recovery test in which they failed over their production data center to a backup data center. The test was scheduled for 96 hours (4 days) to restore their Tier 0 Mission Critical services, and involved 43 Applications, 17 different Infrastructure […]

If you’re new to Business Continuity, you have a lot to learn.  A thorough understanding of Risk – and how to assess Risk – need not be on your To Do list. As a BCM professional, you already know how much time you spend on Risk Assessments.  Have you ever considered how little value a […]

That question usually comes from an executive after some other organization has a business crisis that makes global or national headlines. The question causes anxiety in many Business Continuity Planners. I remember the first time I got that question. A local business had suffered a lightning strike, cutting power and frying much of their electrical […]

An enterprise disaster recovery invocation may activate 100’s of plans, incorporating 10’s of thousands of tasks and 100+ responders collaborating over 72 hours to achieve effective service restoration. One of the challenges for the Incident Commander is scheduling resources for achieving the desired RTO.  Based on the resource allocation done in the planning phase, the […]

An enterprise disaster recovery invocation may activate 100’s of Plans, incorporating 10’s of thousands of Tasks and 100+ responders collaborating over 72 hours to achieve effective service restoration. One of the challenges for the Incident Commander is sequencing Recovery Plans & Tasks, to achieve the lowest Recovery Time.  If Planners have tools to simulate plan […]

A new finish for your old car may look great, but in the end, it may still be a ’71 Pinto.  The cost of the BIA process – writing, distributing, validating, analyzing, reporting, presenting to Management, revising and repeating annually – can be a staggering amount.  Yet a BIA may be no more valuable than […]

Passengers on the Titanic didn’t think it could sink.  When it did, there wasn’t room for everyone in the lifeboats.  By slavishly tying your BCM program to industry ‘standards’, you may find yourself adrift during a business disruption.  Standards are only guidelines.  They’re no substitute for the knowledge necessary when disruptions occur. BCM industry standards […]

This is the final installment of our 5 part blog series exploring the value of an Incident Management Framework within a Business Continuity Management program.  This installment – the 4th P – focuses on Program Management: Building an effective Enterprise-wide Business Continuity program requires much more than BIAs and some Plans.  Successful implementation of an […]

Previously, this series focused on Planning & Plan Development- the first 2 of the 4Ps of the Incident Management Framework-. This blog explores the 3rd P: Preparedness. Planning enables Plan development.  Plans should help carry out those strategies in response to outages.  But Plans should not be the end-state of a BCM program. The next […]