Author: Jim Mitchell
A frequent speaker at Business Continuity conferences, many of Jim Mitchell’s blogs can be found elsewhere on eBRP’s website and has published articles in DRJ, Continuity Insights and Continuity Central. Jim has more than 20 years of experience in Business Continuity; if you don’t agree with his opinions – he won’t be surprised.
Recently, eBRP was invited to participate as observers of an Annual DR test of a southwest energy Company – conducting its first Disaster Recovery test of its new Backup Data Centre. Our role included assisting and advising client teams on leveraging features of our eBRP Suite (which holds all their…
BCM Program – How many Plans?
Business Continuity Planning starts with setting the Program Objectives. Is the focus on recovering IT infrastructure that support the delivery of products & services? Is it about ensuring continuity of business? Or, is it responding to a natural calamity impacting your site or region? To achieve your Program Objectives, different…
The BIA isn’t Dead – Let’s Stop Trying to Kill it!
Many organizations rely on surveys to collect everything from impacts to paperclips. Automated collection of both Impact and other Planning data without a clear means of utilizing the results (other than burying them in a Plan) are complex and flawed exercises. The BIA isn’t dead, but its original form has…
The ERM / BCM Partnership
To meet today’s needs, always-on enterprises need to mitigate risks, be prepared to respond and recover quickly to meet internal, customer and regulatory objectives. Two principles are empirical: no amount of mitigation reduces potential risks to zero; and mitigation costs money. When funding for geo-diverse split processing, outsourcing, adopting cloud…
Let’s Agree to Bridge the RTO Gap
Business Continuity (BC) planners have long had disagreements with IT regarding when the IT RTO clock starts ticking and when the underlying Business Process stakeholders assume it does. In today’s technology-leveraged business world, BC planners base their Continuity plans on Application RTO’s. Meanwhile, IT Disaster Recovery (DR) planners understand that…
Incident Management vs. Crisis Management
Imagine for a moment that your company building was impacted by a natural disaster; what will happen to the day-to-day operational activities? Suppose, some of the executives in your company were responsible for a scandal, how will you manage the company’s brand/reputation? Unplanned events occur, and it can be devastating…
Resiliency Revisited
News travel fast. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” All it took was this one tweet from Justine Sacco, senior director of corporate communications at IAC to her then 170 Twitter followers. Within a matter of minutes, while she was asleep in the plane,…
BIA – Back to Basics
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) should identify the criticality of the business functions and rank them. This racking & stacking of business functions helps in prioritizing which business functions must be continued (or resumed, if interrupted) and how much resources will be allocated to the continuation of the process. The…
Developing Tomorrow’s BCM Plans – Standardization
(NOTE: This is the first part of the 7th in a series of articles discussing the future of Business Continuity Management. The series starts here.) Having worked through the Planning phase – gathering data, transforming that raw data into usable information, identifying gaps and gaining an understanding of recovery priorities…