April and May have been a challenge, haven’t they? If the financial crisis wasn’t enough, there were multiple power outages in the Sydney CBD, progressing to a global swine flu outbreak. They’ve been accompanied by a sudden interest in business continuity plan development and testing.
Case studies make interesting reading: IT teams fumbling in dark data centres randomly shutting down computer systems before 1-hour standby battery systems were due to fail, contact centre staff bombarded with voice messages on their mobile phones, people climbing out of the top of lifts after being stranded for hours, and general chaos and confusion around roles and responsibilities during an outage.
Some affected organisations invoked components of their continuity plans – but those without one were less fortunate. We heard of one services company that lost its longest-standing client, valued at tens of thousands of dollars in revenue a month. Others used crisis communications plans and failover procedures to inform customers that they were relocating to their backup site and that “for us, it’s business as usual”.
Business continuity health check
Is it time for a health check of your business continuity management (BCM) program?
Many organisations lack the expertise or have no time available to implement and maintain a BCM program to adequately protect them from significant business interruptions, loss of staff, building impact, IT systems failure, flood or fire.
If you already have a program in place, it was likely developed some time ago, and it could well be out of date: business locations, functions, processes and IT systems will almost certainly have changed since it was developed. Further, many plans never undergo rigorous testing and statistics show that over 80% of businesses with untested continuity plans do not recover from a major incident.
Our Business Continuity Health Check assesses the effectiveness of your organisations’ BCM program. If you don’t have a plan, it will help you to identify your current level of risk exposure and the critical elements required to ensure your organisation can recover effectively from a major incident.