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• Creative Business Continuity

Creative Business Continuity

written on January 23, 2009 by Laura Pettit Rusick

As a small or mid-sized business CEO, do you cringe when you hear business continuity or disaster planning raised as an issue? Does it seem like a waste of time, money or both?

Not sure if this applies to you? Your risk is high - 40% of businesses will be out of business within a year after losing data in a disaster. Within five years, 90% of the companies will be out of business. Business continuity planning is a form of insurance.

Are you regulated by your industry or legislation? Legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley for public companies, HIPAA for health care and GLBA for financial institutions require business continuity planning. Your customers' compliance requirements may necessitate a plan from you. Have you talked to your critical vendors about their plans?

Everyone knows that backing up data is crucial, but preparing for a systems failure or larger disaster is just as critical.

What is Business Continuity?

Simply stated, business continuity, often called disaster recovery, is the function that keeps a business up and running after some type of disaster. Can your customers be serviced in the wake of a hurricane, fire or flood? From a pandemic like bird flu where workers cannot go into office buildings to the loss of electricity in big portions of the Midwest and East Coast, disasters come in many forms. Business can be adversely affected by disasters on a smaller scale, too - a server catching on fire, a hard drive crashing or a laptop being stolen.

First Things First

• Define how long you can afford to be shut down. If you are down, how quickly do you need to recover? What are the minimum tasks required to run your business for 3 days, 2 weeks and 30 days or beyond? For three days, you may not need to cut checks. By two weeks, you may have to issue customer refunds, distribute payroll checks and pay vendors.
• Know where you will locate staff if your facility can't be occupied. If you reduce your level of service requirements during a disaster, you will benefit by having to support fewer people and systems during the disaster.
• Review and prioritize your computer systems. Know what availability you need on a day-to-day basis, and what systems need to be recovered in the case of a disaster. The management analysis system that gets used once a month probably isn't a priority. However, the order entry or medical records system probably is, along with systems supporting customer service. Your company's priorities need to drive recovery priorities.
• Create a plan that is specific to your business. The plan for a multi-national corporation is more complex than the one for a home-based business, but all organizations need a plan. Make sure it covers people, process and technology. Test it and keep it updated when events occur such as acquisitions and IT infrastructure changes.

Five Creative, Cost-Effective Solutions

You can pay a service to store your data and to hold disaster recovery workspace and data center space. If you are looking for more cost-effective options, consider these examples:

1. If you have a second location outside the region of the main location, create extra space in each facility for a disaster situation.  Consider workspace and data center space.

2. Contract with an outsourcer for disaster recovery space whether or not you outsource your data center today. Now that outsourcers offer space on virtualized servers, this service is more cost-effective.

3. Have your IT outsourcer back up your data to a secure, remote site rather than pay a separate company to keep tapes off-site.

4. Partner with another organization to exchange disaster recovery space.

5. Expand your work from home policy. You may not need to reserve workspace if enough people are capable of working remotely.

Business continuity doesn't have to be costly.  Focus your business continuity planning on high priority areas first. Create a plan, test and communicate. Look for creative solutions to off-site recovery space to reduce costs.

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Pettit Rusick