Disaster Recovery Journal

With all of the unknowns that factor into preparedness planning, it can be hard enough as Business Continuity Planners to plan for disasters and business interruptions without life throwing curveballs. However, as anyone who has responded to an incident can attest, things never go as planned and you can never be fully prepared for everything. When you involve the “human factor,” it becomes even more difficult to make assumptions and prepare in advance, as innumerable influencers, personal priorities, and “herd behavior” can turn logical people illogical, override priorities and good intentions, and derail the best laid plans.

Recent examples of this include the London riots and Verizon strike acts of sabotage, and some might even say, the News of the World scandal – the same customers and employees relied upon by the involved organizations are now the perpetrators/threat against which the organizations must protect themselves. These affected organizations likely never assumed that such events would occur, go so far, or even that response measures would be necessary.

As anyone who monitors news sources knows, British Petroleum (BP) has taken a beating in the media since the April 20^th explosion that led to eleven deaths and hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.  While the latest effort to cap the well appears effective, the perception associated with BP's reactive "by the seat of our pants" response effort failed to restore feelings of goodwill and faith, which will most likely lead to a continuation of boycotts, lawsuits and market-share loss. 

"Oh $#!+": The Importance of Mitigating Single Points of Failure (SPOF)

Almost everyone, at some point in their career, has experienced that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach when a critical document is lost to a computer crash or malfunction.  There are few worse feelings than the sense of helplessness and frustration felt after losing something that cannot be easily replaced or recovered.  Unfortunately, the "out of my hands" excuse no longer works for bosses, just as an "Act of God" defense no longer satisfies customers when their products or services are no longer available as contracted or expected.

Private organizations working to implement a crisis or incident management structure as part of their business continuity program often look to available public standards for guidance.  One such structure, a standard practice throughout much of the public sector, is called the Incident Command System, or ICS.

At a high level, ICS serves as a national, standardized, on-scene emergency management structure designed to enable agencies or organizations to follow an integrated organizational structure that is scalable to address the complexity and demands of a solo or joint (multi-agency) response effort without being mired by jurisdictional restrictions.  There is some confusion over the similarities/differences between ICS and the National Incident Management System (NIMS).  Simply put, NIMS utilizes the ICS structure as part of its higher-level focus of providing a template structure and response strategies for agencies across the U.S. to follow when responding to a domestic event.