Business continuity is about surviving the short term
We hear the phrases Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery used more or less interchangeably. There’s also another phrase we hear from time to time, Business Resumption. How are they different?
- Disaster recovery is an older phrase originating at the dawn of the business computer age back in the days of mainframes in clean rooms. It refers to systems recovering from a disaster.
- Business Resumption is about getting a business back to resume normal operations after a major interruption.
- Business Continuity is focused on the business’s current operation. If something happens, how to you ensure your operations and processes will continue without interruption?
Today, we’ll look at business continuity and look at the other two topics later.
Business continuity is all about surviving in the short term. If you’re a bank or any type of time critical business, it’s essentially a front office worry, but it’s the sort of worry people to put off because such planning is a chore.
There’s no question that you need to have IT support during a crisis, just as you need your phones and just as you need to have electricity, but would you hand over the task of writing a BCP plan to an electrician? Of course not, but maybe we should.
In many ways electricians are much more competent to think in terms of business continuity. Electricians are safety conscious: they were thick insulating gloves when handling high voltage equipment. They make sure everything is properly grounded before they touch anything. They always know precisely where every cable connects and they keep exact records which are updated at every change.
On the other hand, modern IT departments often grew organically with the business and were put together in a haphazard fashion. While there’s been a tremendous amount of improvement in the past decade, one of the hidden benefits arising from our worrying over the Y2K bug, it’s just so easy to purchase, install, or create systems these days that we find ourselves with a hodgepodge of uncontrolled servers and applications. If IT doesn’t have a clear idea of all the systems in place, why would any business wish IT to be responsible for planning the continuity of activities depending on these systems?
In short, business continuity isn’t about providing systems during a crisis, it’s about making sure activities go on as smoothly as possible.
At the close of the 19th century, electricity was then as PCs were at the close of the 20th. John Pierpoint Morgan installed a generator in his New York mansion and illuminated his home with electric bulbs instead of gas fired lights. An electrician lived in the home to keep the generator going and to maintain the wiring, a critical activity as the complicated tangle caused short circuits and a few fire scares. Since then, electric service has evolved. It has become more reliable by several orders of magnitude and it has disappeared in the background. We don’t think of it as high-tech anymore.
On the other hand, we still think of IT as high tech because we still think of IT at all. IT has not disappeared into the background. The service isn’t as reliable as we would like it to be. This is a bit unfair because the multitude of services delivered by modern computing exceeds the restricted number of services offered by electricity, which makes the provision of electricity a simpler activity to manage than the provision of IT. Because we see IT around and because IT systems are so sensitive to disruptions, then we tend to blindly give IT the task of ensuring business continuity. But this is wrong as and we saw earlier, in a crisis IT’s task is to provide disaster recovery services and to continue providing as many IT services as possible during the crisis. Business tasks remain the business’s responsibility.
But what are those tasks? Line managers and staff know very well what they are but in a crisis, they find themselves deprived of their work place and work tools and this disruption stops them in their tracks. Planning for business continuity provides the resources and the information to spark people into action in dealing with a crisis.
Copyright 2008 Vincent Poirier
