Disaster Recovery Journal

“By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.” — Ben Franklin

As a Director for Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR), I’m often asked, “Why do I need to invest in BCDR?” Even with recent catastrophic events such as the Japan earthquake and the flooding in Thailand, businesses continue to ignore BCDR planning and prioritize growth over business protection. In fact, many businesses appear to feel it will only impact companies other than themselves and ignore BCDR planning. This myopic attitude can lead to disastrous results for the business. Equally disconcerting, many companies take an “either/or,” versus a complimentary, approach regarding BCDR planning.

Chances are very high that you have an iPhone, tablet or smartphone in your pocket, on your desk, or in your briefcase. You are connected to your office, your family and your friends at all times. This is in part thanks to the apps that we all like to download and use. We all use apps for time management, contact lists, playing games, budgeting, etc.

Since we're all using these devices and apps, we thought it would be good idea to take a look at the apps specific to disaster recovery and business continuity. We've put together a list of some of the more popular and maybe a few lesser known apps. Use this list of apps as a resource and of course, please post a comment letting us know if we've missed an app. (We are planning on updating the website with an app resource page - so the more feedback from you the better. You will notice that we did not include the apps that are essentially ebooks about disaster recovery and business continuity - this is another blog post all together!)

I enjoyed reading Gregg Jacobsen's blog post, The Trouble with BIAs. He commented that after completing a business impact analysis, the DR solutions designed to meet the business unit's RTO and RPO are too expensive. As a result, the typical reaction to the proposed solution is, "The business won't pay that much!" 

It reminded of my days on a Disaster Recovery Planning team, when I was Manager of IT Procurement.  We had the usual challenges of business units and executives saying they wanted to recover everything (no data loss) almost immediately. Then we would give them the expected annual cost, and they would say "Nevermind."  That was at a large, international bank that had U.S. and international regulations regarding recovery time, application availability, and regular DR testing.

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. 

Martians are landing on earth! – “War of the Worlds”; H. G. Wells

“Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria” – Dr. Peter Venkman; Ghostbusters

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:

During a recent job interview, the topic of BIAs came up, and, since I've done a lot of them over the years, I felt comfortable discussing them.  I mentioned my experience with clients who used what a vendor team furnished as the results of BIAs they did for them, and the client's IT architects would develop the solution they felt were capable of meeting the RTO (availability) and RPO (data protection) requirements.  And they would ask us "how much for this solution?"   Fair question, but they didn't like hearing six- and low seven-figure answers.  "The business won't pay that much!"  Typical, we thought: they give the consultant impact information, and then complain the solution's too expensive.  The hiring manager said he sees it all the time.  The interview ended favorably, I thought.  But recalling how common it's become for practitioners to see this scenario replayed so often started bothering me.

Last night, it hit me: The consultants weren't getting the right information.  They weren't getting clear, unassailable financial impact data, they were getting time frames for "when the pain becomes too great," without converting the "pain" into dollars and cents.  I'd been making that very mistake for some time, and, thinking back, I wondered why did I (and so many other practitioners) fall into this counterproductive rut?  Two reasons:

So maybe you've been working in the field of business continuity and disaster recovery for a while now - you've got lots of experience, a roster of happy clients, and you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and tools. But how do you add validity to your experience and set yourself apart from others who are new to business continuity or disaster recovery?

The short and easy answer is: certification. To learn more about certification and how this applies to your profession, we went to the experts and asked our questions to the team at the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).

Today we closed out the last day of our Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Train-the-Trainer class.  Based on the strong student evaluations that were turned in after the class, everyone in the class had a good time and learned a lot.  As an instructor, that a great feeling to know we made a positive impact with others.

The day starting out

I’ve decide to post some extra editions of my blog this week and next.  The reason I’m doing this is because I’m blessed to have the opportunity to be on the road again (Willy Nelson) teaching emergency preparedness.  This week I’m back in Emmittsburg, Maryland teaching at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Management Institute (FEMA EMI; www.fema.gov ), and next week I’ll be in Topeka, Kansas working with the Kansas Division of Emergency Management ( www.kansastag.gov/default.asp ) doing the same thing.

FEMA EMI