Lessons in Business Continuity

This morning, I am again reminded the importance of back-ups. I went to retrieve some files from my old laptop, only to discover that they were corrupted during the last operating system upgrade. Thankfully, I ensured that I had a backup before I did the upgrade (Murphy's Law!!) and was able to pull the files from the backup CD.

Doing back-ups and having a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plan seem like a no brainers - but then why are they so often not where dollars are spent in an IT organization?

Only when the benefits or the consequences (aka Risks) of not having a backup or business continuity plan becomes clear, does buy-in happen. Unfortunately, it takes time (and funding) to pull together a truely workable and effective business continuity plan. And it takes time to achieve corporate buy-in that time and money be spent in this area.

How can you accelerate the buy-in process?

A couple ideas:

• Identify areas of risk to the business.

  For example, what is the impact to the business if the ability to recieve orders via EDI is cut off?

  What is the impact to the business if the building floods and the servers that maintain inventory and distribution counts are cut unavailable?
  

• Identify solutions that can be implemented in a multi-step fashion focusing on the highest return with the lowest outlay ('the low hanging fruit')

  
  

• Pitch your ideas laterally as well as upward, create buyin by focusing on how the business will be positively affected. I.e., avoid focusing doomsday, catestrophic events but instead focus on real-world everyday possibilities.

Business continuity is a huge topic which I could write on for days, but in reality what I write isn't important - what's important is how you present your proposals and your ability to gain approval for business critical solutions (even if the business doesn't recognize their criticality.)