Enterprise Briefing

 

Detailed research conducted last year by the Conference Board and the US Department of Homeland Security on US companies' business continuity strategy revealed that three-quarters of businesses had a plan. Off-site storage of data and documents was the most common business continuity procedure and was undertaken by 81% of companies.

 

However, with increasing incidents of massive natural disasters and terrorism, many business continuity plans might not be adequate. Analyst Gartner believes that plans should have contingencies for outages lasting up to 30 days, but its survey of 359 business continuity professionals in the US, UK and Canada found that nearly 60% only planned for an outage of up to seven days.

 

"The fact that most organizations plan for an outage that lasts up to seven days indicates a huge hole in those organizations’ ability to sustain business operations if a regional disaster strikes," says Roberta Witty, research vice president at Gartner. "The impact of a disaster that lasts more than one week can have enormous negative impact on revenue, reputation and brand. Regional incidents, terrorism, service provider outages and pandemics can easily last longer than seven days."

 

 

Regular testing, or exercising, of the business continuity plan is essential to ensure that it remains relevant in the face of rapid changing business and market conditions. However, the Conference Board found that a quarter of companies at the enterprise level did not conduct regular risk audits, mitigation, or activation of their backup facilities, and one-third did not undertake regular tabletop exercises. The latter is a simple but crucial way of testing the business continuity plan, where participants discuss what action they would take in response to a business interruption scenario without actually disrupting operations.

 

Among companies that do test their business continuity plans, Gartner found that just 28% reported that their last exercise went well. A whopping 61% had problems with the exercise and Gartner warns that this is unlikely to give any company a sense of security that their plan will give them adequate coverage in the event of any disaster.

 

Business continuity planning needs to cover a wide variety of activity. According to the Conference Board's study, IT is the most frequently covered item, appearing in 92% of plans. Other key activities include moving operations to a new location (82%), providing telecom services (78%), identifying essential employees (75%) and working from home (71%).

 

Given the importance of IT to modern business, it is no surprise that IT tops the list. According to a survey on attitudes to IT from IDC, business managers' main IT priority has become efficacy (meeting business needs), rather than efficiency (improving employee productivity). In light of this, availability has become their number one requirement and this demands rock-solid business continuity.

 

 

Despite IT's profile in business continuity, analyst the Burton Group warns that many organizations are at risk because their data centers' plans have not kept up with current business demands. Richard Jones, VP for Burton Group's Data Center Strategies service says that a 'perfect storm' of issues is brewing which needs to be factored in.

 

Data volumes have exploded over the last few years and multiple regulations demand that organizations retain their data for longer and more securely. Companies competing in rapidly moving globalized markets have very little tolerance to any downtime whatsoever, particularly those that have adopted just-in-time manufacturing and distribution. To compound matters, many organizations have trimmed their workforce to the minimum with equipment typically running at 100% all of the time. Keeping these data centers operating is a fine balancing act that needs budget commitment from the business rather than cuts.

 

Although rock-solid IT business continuity is essential to successful businesses, IT and communications also plays a key roles in helping companies minimize disruption. The move towards virtualization in data centers, for example, is being driven partly by business continuity requirements like systems recovery and backup. And according to Wainhouse Research rich media collaboration applications are being used by 58% of companies as part of their plan. These include videoconferencing, IP telephony, telepresence, web and audio conferencing, and unified communications.