Business Continuity

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

2016-10-31T10:48:52+11:00By |Business Continuity|

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

2016-08-30T16:15:31+10:00By |Business Continuity|

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

2016-08-12T10:20:05+10:00By |Business Continuity|

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

2016-07-14T13:40:43+10:00By |Business Continuity|

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

2016-07-11T10:51:12+10:00By |Business Continuity|