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©Cogent Works Ltd.2011
Cogent Works - Business Continuity
We have evolved Business Continuity plans for many organisation over two decades.
Perhaps more importantly we have experience of enacting these plans in the face of an environmental disaster.
Frequently plans we see ignore the practical issues associated with keeping a company running. Business Continuity can’t always rely on a skeleton service.
They fail to consider the critical issues that faces you when a problem is evolving and you don’t yet know if Business Continuity will be affected.
Who makes which decisions and when, based on what key points. Is it a series of decisions, or just one ?
Put simply - Don’t worry about preserving equipment when the water’s one metre above the carpet. The decision will have been made for you. So where has the risk got to reach before staff leave, computers are switched off and moved, equipment moved to a higher floor.
When can you return to the building ? Can only some of the people return at first ? What about connecting services ?
Plans that simply consider how to get the computer back up, without thinking about phones, redirection of calls, seating, mail, active files with client paperwork, transport and parking at alternative facilities offer only system continuity. Business Continuity is a whole other issue.
Virtualisation is now a standard practise with all of our systems, bringing opportunities to create secondary facilities cheaply and effectively. It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it makes a good number trivial to deal with, where once they were not. Think about using Cloud facilities, not only as backup, but as part of the normal system.
We have evolved Business Continuity plans for many organisation over two decades.
Perhaps more importantly we have experience of enacting these plans in the face of an environmental disaster.
Frequently plans we see ignore the practical issues associated with keeping a company running. Business Continuity can’t always rely on a skeleton service.
They fail to consider the critical issues that faces you when a problem is evolving and you don’t yet know if Business Continuity will be affected.
Who makes which decisions and when, based on what key points. Is it a series of decisions, or just one ?
Put simply - Don’t worry about preserving equipment when the water’s one metre above the carpet. The decision will have been made for you. So where has the risk got to reach before staff leave, computers are switched off and moved, equipment moved to a higher floor.
When can you return to the building ? Can only some of the people return at first ? What about connecting services ?
Plans that simply consider how to get the computer back up, without thinking about phones, redirection of calls, seating, mail, active files with client paperwork, transport and parking at alternative facilities offer only system continuity. Business Continuity is a whole other issue.
Virtualisation is now a standard practise with all of our systems, bringing opportunities to create secondary facilities cheaply and effectively. It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it makes a good number trivial to deal with, where once they were not. Think about using Cloud facilities, not only as backup, but as part of the normal system.