As the CEO of a company you hire a CIO and then hope that Business Continuity (BC) just happens. Let’s take another look. BC is the ability of an organization to perform critical business processes, protect critical assets, provide service and support for its customers, and to maintain its viability as a business before, during, and after an emergency or other disruptive incident. If you buy into this definition, then you are the CEO who believes that “big jobs” have to be sanctioned by the “big boss” and taking care of a customers is the “biggest job” one can undertake. And that is the job of the CEO.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process of coordinating, facilitating and executing activities that ensure effectiveness in: identifying and mitigating operational risks before they occur, responding to disruptive events (natural and man-made, and accidental and intentional), recovering mission-critical business operations after disruptive events, conducting a postmortem of an event to improve future recovery operations.
According to the Gartner Group BCM is composed of six components.
- Crisis/incident management
- Emergency response (dynamic and situational)
- IT Disaster recovery
- Pandemic preparededness planning ( the planning efforts are much more extensive than traditional BCM)
- Contingency planning (all scenario-based planning) efforts)
- Business recovery
Notice that IT Disaster Recovery, the component the CIO usually spearheads for the IT landscape, is just one component of the picture, shown here.
I can pretty much guarantee you, that most CIOs don’t have an IT DR plan for their IT landscape. Most times it is due to the fact that no one wants to fund DR. I really doubt that most CEOs have a BC plan for their business either. If your company is one of those whose CEO has sponsored one, great, you belong to an elite club, and OneNeck can help you complete the IT DR component. If you don’t have a BC plan but want to get going on the IT DR component to impress the CEO, we can help you there as well. Our goal is simple, we want CIOs to succeed. We want you to be known as Chief Innovative/Intelligent Officer, and I know that OneNeck can help with that goal.
OneNeck’s Disaster Recovery services assure our clients’ data, networks and systems are protected and quickly recoverable upon the declaration of a disaster. The services can include redundant hardware, advanced networking architectures, customized backup and recovery solutions, data center options, and a skilled staff to execute the plan. Simulations and testing are used to verify readiness and fine-tune disaster recovery documentation. OneNeck can deliver solutions that range from helping your company develop a plan to providing a replicated hot site.
OneNeck’s solutions are broad and far-reaching. We’re perfectly positioned to address the diverse and complex needs of any company. We service thousands of client locations, both in the U.S. and around the world out of our datacenters and operations centers in North America. OneNeck’s Datacenters are deliberately located in the most desirable locations minimizing the risks of natural disasters that can interrupt power and telecommunication systems.
My next blog will have some thoughts on how to travel the BCM journey.
