Resiliency Exercises for Remote Working Ecosystem

Supporting a remote workforce during the pandemic has been, and continues to be, one of the top priorities for all organizations. While employee wellness is the top priority, enabling remote-friendly ecosystems and addressing technology challenges are critical for productivity. From a resiliency program perspective, focus should be placed on proactively identifying key risks and gaps which could impact one’s remote working ecosystem.

Technology is arguably the most critical dependency for the modern workforce. An outage to critical systems will impact employee productivity, especially in remote working environments where collaboration is highly dependent on video conferencing, instant messaging, and other such services.

To be prepared for technology disruptions, you must proactively assess the technology impact profile, and build and test recovery strategies to minimize impacts. If you already know the risk and impact profile for your core infrastructure, systems/applications, and third-party services, the next step is to build recovery strategies to address those risks.

The pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to reevaluate the effectiveness of current strategies, and in some cases, exposed the material weaknesses in such strategies. As such, it is critical you review and exercise your technology recovery strategies to proactively identify and mitigate gaps before they are exposed during an actual disruption that could severely impact your operations.

Prior to the pandemic, you may have conducted disaster recovery (DR) and/or integrated recovery exercises with the business to test recovery strategies. However, as many resiliency practitioners have pivoted to support COVID-19 response efforts, routine program maintenance activities have been delayed or postponed indefinitely. It is important organizations do not lose sight of the importance of exercising and testing with an emphasis on critical technology ecosystems supporting remote work. To start, you should work with the business to update the impact profile of a system by considering how that system is supporting/enabling remote work. This updated impact profile can be used to prioritize the testing of applications/systems. To design a more integrated exercise you should consider including critical business operations that are directly impacted by the disruption and play the disruption scenario from DR to business continuity planning (BCP).

One of the biggest challenges in the pandemic era is conducting exercises remotely in an effective manner. Below are the few suggestions that you may consider as you plan for an effective remote exercise:

• Leadership support: “COVID fatigue” is real, but at the same time we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of existing and emerging risks. It is important we get the right leadership support for conducting exercises and understand the risk scenarios that “keep them up at night.”
• Alignment with strategic priorities: Align the objective and goals of the exercise with the strategic priorities of the organization
• Communication: Support leadership in communicating the importance and value of the exercise to their organizations
• Keep it simple: The exercise goal should be presented as an opportunity to help the organization identifying resiliency gaps proactively and build the muscle memory to respond to technology disruptions more effectively and efficiently. Exercise success factors include:
  • Updating the DR and BCP strategies to align with changes due to remote working
  • Adjusting recovery times if there is any change in response time due to remote connectivity to data centers
  • Reviewing contact information both for IT and business; office desk phone information should be updated with mobile and/or home contact information
  • Review/update SLA and vendor contacts if the system/application is hosted by third-party

Remotely exercising resiliency capabilities is a challenging proposition given the COVID fatigue and the perceived resilience achieved through COVID response efforts. The key is to obtain the right leadership support, communicate the importance of exercising given emerging threats, and keeping the exercise simple.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vaishali Jain & Eric Chiang

Vaishali Jain is a senior manager for business continuity management at ServiceNow. In her role, she serves as a resident expert on all things BCM at ServiceNow. She was introduced to business continuity during her consulting years with Deloitte where she got a chance to learn about BCM concepts and understand how continuity works for different industries. … Eric Chiang is a resiliency practitioner with 17 years of experience building, implementing, and running resiliency programs for global enterprises across multiple sectors, including technology, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, consumer products, and retail. He is a leader in Ernst & Young’s infrastructure and service resiliency practice based out of San Francisco, Calif.