Disaster Recovery Journal

Since 2002, my S-Corporation carried "Errors and Omissions" or Professional Insurance coverage. As an independent BCP/DR consultant, are you adequately insured? In 2008, my insurance carrier expanded coverage (known as the Bell endorsement) to include insurance for several crisis and emergency conditions that might create a business loss and hence a claim. The items covered may be of interest to you. They were not available in all states.

According to a Wall Street Journal article (see Penn State Warned On Accreditation at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444318104577589174048808462.html?mod=ITP_pageone_1 ), "Pennsylvania State University's accreditation is "in jeopardy," one of the nation's primary accrediting groups warned the school, in the latest fallout from the Jerry Sandusky child-sex-abuse scandal. "

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the WSJ reported, "said there was 'insufficient evidence' that Penn State was complying with standards related to governance and integrity, as well as meeting financial obligations. "

California is assessing homeowners who live in vulnerable, fire-prone areas a fee to cover the cost of fire protection services, including very expensive suppression of wild fires.  It’s about time someone acted to place the cost of protecting vulnerable properties on those who own them.

In a business world that is embracing the cloud more and more every day, it is interesting to see that, while the cloud benefits companies in several ways, these companies seldom demonstrate their advantage from the cloud in terms of ROI (return on investment).  This may be because many of the benefits from cloud computing are intangible and may not be fully realized until further down the road.  

Therefore, to calculate returns from cloud computing, a business will most likely not employ the standard ROI calculations.  Instead, the company may use one of the following ways to determine ROI from cloud computing:

Today’s small business owners face daily challenges in running their businesses, and one of the more difficult challenges is managing business continuity and disaster recovery planning; however, the primary focus for most business owners is on their core business competencies, not on becoming resiliency experts.

Because investments in business continuity and disaster recovery planning directly impact the bottom line, there is a constant need to achieve real business benefits and mitigate costs against a backdrop of time pressures and limited business continuity skills. To add to this pressure, many small businesses are now looking toward cloud services, and what they may offer. However, this can add even more complexity and apprehension in adopting business continuity and disaster recovery planning methods.

What other challenges to you face when convincing small business owners to adopt business continuity and disaster recovery practices?

By Glen Bricker, Managing Consultant, Avalution Consulting
Article originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

The goal of any recovery plan, regardless of the size or nature of the organization, is to protect life, minimize damage from an event, and quickly resume the delivery of critical products and services to meet customer requirements.  How this is accomplished, however, not only depends on the nature of the organization, but also its customers, size and resources, and culture.  The objective is to build plans that are based on realistic requirements, fit within the organization’s culture, and remain cost effective and appropriate.  The remainder of this article will discuss these characteristics and how they are incorporated into recovery plans.

By Christopher Burton, Senior Consultant, Avalution Consulting
Article originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

Since 2005, Avalution Consulting has performed hundreds of business continuity exercises with organizations in every major industry and sector throughout the United States.  No matter the scope of the exercise or the level of complexity, several key elements enable the successful outcome of this important component of the business continuity lifecycle.  This perspective shares some of our lessons learned, highlights the importance of exercising and provides insight into our time-tested exercise methodology. 

By Susan Giffin, Managing Consultant, Avalution Consulting
Article originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

We recently published a perspective (Business Continuity for Small Businesses – We Can Do Better!) on how most small and medium-sized organizations escape the complexity of larger organizations and thus have the opportunity to implement streamlined business continuity planning processes, which should include:

By Robert Giffin, Director, Avalution Consulting
Article originally posted on Avalution Consulting’s Blog

If you have less than 500 employees, odds are you don’t have someone working full-time on business continuity. And, unless regulations require you to perform planning in some manner, your organization may not have a business continuity plan at all!