Publishing your DR assumptions as tactical policies is critical to your DR budget, your DR architecture, your DR plan – and your career survival after a disaster Assumptions can have a critical impact on the plan itself, on the budget for the plan, and even the ability to actually execute the plan. The assumptions made… Continue reading Assume the Best and Prepare For the Worst

On June 29th of 2009, the cloud hosting vendor Rackspace experienced a power failure which brought down customer servers in their Texas datacenter. Rackspace estimates this will cost them up to $3.5 million in customer service credits alone. Even the popular singer Justin Timberlake was impacted by the outage, bemoaning the failure to his fans… Continue reading Connecting Business Process, IT Infrastructure

Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836 people in August 2005, cost over $80 billion in damage, and flooded 80 percent of the city. Yet analysis — the Hurricane Pam simulation — had revealed the dangers in July 2004. Before three months had ended in 2008, 23,500 people had become infected with dengue fever in Rio de Janeiro.… Continue reading Crisis! The Urgent Need for Learning

Every business continuity manager develops contingency plans for fires, floods, earthquakes and other disasters. The focus of these plans is to protect life, limit damage, and maintain business functions. One of the most overlooked concerns is that of a critical person becoming ill or missing while visiting remote or austere regions of the world. Traffic… Continue reading Planning for Senior Executive Mishaps that Affect the Corporation

Print-to-mail disaster recovery has evolved in many organizations over the last few years from an optional process to an operational or risk management necessity. Once the decision has been made that your organization needs a formal print and mail disaster recovery plan the hard part begins. How do you develop such a plan, and can… Continue reading How to Determine if Self Recovery is an Option for You

On June 29, Rackspace experienced a localized outage in its Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas (DFW) data center, its first outage in more than two years. The following week, the same data center experienced another outage, this time shorter in duration and affecting a smaller amount of customers. What resulted was an important learning opportunity for the… Continue reading Managing Downtime in a Hyper Connected Web 2.0 World

No two organizations are the same. Each has unique objectives, challenges and opportunities and thus needs solutions that fit it exactly. Where most organizations are the same, however, is in their desire to focus the right level of effort in the right area at the right time – to ensure that expending limited resources brings… Continue reading Getting it Right the First Time

At the risk of being branded a heretic, there are times when we in the business continuity profession get in the way and become our own worst enemy. To see what I mean, look at a typical small business – say 50 employees or less. On top of this struggling enterprise layer the business continuity… Continue reading Keep It Simple, Stupid

I have been asked recently, “Why does a small business need a business continuity/emergency preparedness plan? Isn’t that really just for big businesses?” For anyone who has owned or operated a small business in their career, there is an understanding that day-to-day survival is one of the primary goals. Making payroll, covering rent, paying vendors/suppliers,… Continue reading The Need For Small Business, Business Continuity

Technology continues to mature to the extent where companies regardless of size may be able to utilize leading edge yet stable solutions and infrastructure. Storage, network, and computing systems have all increased in performance consistent with Moore’s Law (doubling every two years). Software solutions are now available to tie all these components together into a… Continue reading Cloud Computing With Business Resiliency