The Dilemma of Business Continuity Software
What do you do, when you’re a software vendor trying to provide a solution to business continuity managers? You’ve got to make money, if your company is to survive. Read more
Business Continuity Lessons from 10,000 Feet in the Air
Have you ever considered what happens when essential systems for which no backup is possible then stop working? Read more
From Disaster Recovery to Continuity Management
Rather like the progression of the primate to primitive human and thence to homo sapiens, some industry pundits are now pushing this latest development in the disaster recovery chain of evolution: IT service continuity management. Whether this new concept adds much value remains to be seen, but it has the merit of being simple. Read more
Meet Business Continuity’s Cousin in ITIL, Availability Management
Sometimes it can be difficult to see the business forest for the IT trees. If you’ve ever pored over availability management as part of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices and wondered “why?”, here’s the answer. It’s to help prevent your enterprise from suffering catastrophic failure, a.k.a. going pear-shaped or going down the tubes. The specifications of IT availability must always be mapped onto business needs and vice versa. The following examples may help to see how. Read more
Why Data Hoarding Can Hurt Your Business Continuity
Are you a hoarder? Do you compulsively hang onto things that have ceased to be useful or valid, perhaps because they might still serve some purpose? Data hoarding is all about stashing away all that “stuff” that your IT systems accumulate, just in case it comes in useful in the future. Read more
Business Continuity and Resilience – What’s in a Name?
“What’s in a name?” wrote William Shakespeare, centuries ago, going on to state that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. You might rename a rose as stinking bladderwort, for example, but the flower itself won’t change. But what of business continuity – Is it always obvious whether or not aspects of an organisation fall under the business continuity umbrella or belong to organisational resilience? Even experts sometimes seem to tie themselves in knots about this. Take heart, however. As ever, we’ve got the answer for you below. Sometimes, one person uses resilience is used where another might have used business continuity, and vice versa. There is more than one school of thought on this: A. The subcategory school. Business continuity is held to be a subsection of organisational resilience (without necessarily being precise about what either entails). B. The binary belief. Business continuity is a binary, Read more
The (In)Famous 80% Rule for Business Continuity
Is there any statistic that was ever so widely used and abused? It’s the one that says “80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months”, or any similar version. While it’s true that unplanned business disruption can cause financial losses and other prejudice (including bankruptcy), critics of the 80% statistic suggest there is little real data to support it. Read more
Is Business Continuity Tougher for Publicly Held Companies?
Publicly held companies are, naturally enough, more frequently in the public eye than private companies. Their acts, their results and their shortcomings are the subject of scrutiny by analysts and shareholders, because these items have an impact on the reputations of the former and the financial health of the latter. Read more
Could You Charge Back Business Continuity to Departments in Your Organisation?
Chargeback has a certain allure. Instead of one department having to pay for all the products and services it supplies to other departments, you get users and business units to pay for what they use. Since the beginning of the millennium, there has been a trend towards chargeback for IT in particular. CIOs have been using cost-tracking software to see who has been consuming what. Business continuity now has a lot to do with IT. Does it make sense to start charging departments for the amount of business continuity resources they use? Read more
Business Continuity and the Life Cycle of Change
There could be a self-contradiction in the term “business continuity”. We hear so much about the increasing pace of change in technology, organizations, and business in general. So does that mean business continuity is incompatible with the need to continually adapt to new markets and environments? Thankfully, there’s a loophole – after all, we also hear frequently that the only constant is change. Business continuity that continually aligns the business to meet varying conditions then unifies “continuity” and “change”. So far so good, but in that case business continuity managers will also need to understand change and how to handle it. Read more