Business Continuity and Resilience Blog

The quotation “No plan survives first contact with the enemy…” is likely to resonate with any IT executive faced with using their IT DR Plan for the first time.  The chances of any plan instantly fitting the situation are negligible, leaving nowhere to turn.  Instead, rather than consume the golden hour reading and adapting, many choose to discard it in favour of an ad hoc experiential response.   

Imagine you are in the office and a potentially catastrophic IT incident occurs.  Escalation takes place and the team arrives at a predetermined command centre location.  They get briefed, and each key role-assignee is asked to adapt and implement their section of a comprehensive and weighty IT DR Plan.  Each copy must be kept synchronised with others, whilst satisfying the deadlines for services.  

Impact Analysis plays an important part in IT DR Planning.  It generates essential deadlines, ensuring assets are recovered within tolerable limits in an incident, prioritising and setting the required tempo for safe recovery.  It informs business-as-usual decisions to invest in the resilience of the IT estate, identifying risks and improvement opportunities.  

The effects of Covid-19 have significantly raised awareness of Business Continuity Planning, not least because many office-based firms have adapted and applied their plans and worked from home.  However, the operational impacts could not have been foreseen by many others, including manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and events companies. Why? Because virtually all their pre-planned fallback positions faced the same extraordinary challenge - lockdown with frozen budgets, stalled production and a broken supply chain.

Taken from Part 2 of our Business Continuity Blueprint. 

Nobody does business continuity (BC) for the sake of it, there’s always a good reason and it helps if you understand what’s driving it - not least because you can then set firm success criteria.