Category: Disaster Recovery

Planning, Plan Development & Validation are 3 essential phases of building a BCM program. The Planning phase includes Risk Assessment, BIAs and resumption Strategies. Plan Development turns resumption Strategies into actionable Plans.  Validation of Plans through Testing and Exercises builds confidence in the program’s effectiveness. Using different tools from different vendors to conduct those phases […]

January is almost over.  If you haven’t made your Business Continuity New Year Resolutions this is your last chance.  If you made them and broke them, here’s a chance at a fresh start!  Don’t focus on metrics (more plans, more tests, etc.); those are the equivalent of ‘exercise more, eat more vegetables: the kinds of […]

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 stakeholders have to define pragmatic […]

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 been unrecognizably beaten up.  Reliance […]

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 technologies and other mitigation efforts […]

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 triggering a DR plan can […]

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 priority of an individual business […]