Business continuity: How much would a disruption cost you?
Jinfo Blog

By Sarah Dillingham

Abstract

Nobody likes worrying about what happens in a crisis, but the financial implications can be devastating if unplanned for. How can good information management contribute to effective business continuity planning?

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Nobody likes worrying about what would happen in a crisis. It’s natural to enjoy the status quo. But crisis situations do happen, and when they do there is a high chance that they will interrupt day to day business.

Disruptive events can range from damage caused by fire or flood, to staff absence and system failures. Advance planning and preparation is the key to avoiding disruption in these circumstances, and business continuity planning is now standard in most organisations.

But how do you know that your plan would be effective in the event of a real crisis? Having a plan that addresses a wide range of possible threats, and is in line with organisational strategic goals is crucial.

Startlingly, 38% of respondents to a recent KPMG survey did not know the financial impact of a five day business disruption.

Luckily Business Link offers an excellent free tool to help evaluate risks and give information to help build a plan. Inevitably the tool asks a few information related questions, namely:

• Do you have back ups of customer contact details held off site?
• Are your critical documents adequately protected?
• Do you have backups of vital computer information, which are stored off site?

Looking after information often falls to the IT department when it comes to business continuity planning, but there is certainly a role for information professionals here.

Understanding what the critical documents are and where they are located goes along way towards protecting them in the event of a crisis.

Information professionals are forever badgering staff to get information off their desktops and into a central repository for corporate memory and collaboration purposes. Adding business continuity into the mix is another compelling reason for compliance.

One of the biggest trends identified in the KPMG survey is towards cloud computing and use of enterprise social media. This is a general trend within information management and handily dovetails with BCM.

Data hosted in the cloud is outside of the organisation's own premises, but this means that the servers the data actually sits on need to be secure themselves. This is definitely a question to build into any business requirements document for internal social media or cloud data storage solutions.

42% of the survey respondents were in the process of bringing enterprise social media and cloud computing elements into their BCM programmes, but interestingly nearly 40% did not know how much data was actually stored in this way.

Again, this just highlights the importance of understanding what those essential documents are, and why they are so important. In some organisations, particularly within government and financial services, these documents will be marked as records and will be part of a system with a clear retention policy and schedule, and tied into an IT disaster recovery plan.

But the fact is that many organisations are not particularly on the ball when it comes to keeping records, and things like engagement letters, contracts and case studies can be frustratingly hard to lay hands on even in the normal day to day course of business.

As with most things, information success comes back to understanding the organisation. By adhering to good information management practices, and working closely with IT this element of BCM should take care of itself.

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