Swine Flu - DRP - BCP - CIO Issue
What swine flu has done is reminded us all of the necessity to plan for threat scenarios that affect people more than they do data centers and other physical corporate facilities. Alternate work area facilities, mobile recovery units, and other workforce recovery strategies are not effective when people are home sick or there are travel bans in place. In these scenarios, your workforce recovery strategy must rely on remote access solutions or virtual workforce solutions. Large numbers of employees out sick will affect the business (revenue) and cost your company a lot of money in productivity loss (you still pay employees their salary when they are out). In a recent Janco Associates survey, they asked over 300 DRP/BCP decision makers if their company had strategies for workforce recovery in their BCPs, 71% said yes. This means that 29% of you out there have a lot of work to do. Of the 71% that have strategies in place, 82% use remote access procedures as part of their strategy. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed thousands of cases of swine flu in the United States and as other countries including Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Israel, Spain, and all of Europe has confirmed cases. This means health officials have confirmed that the disease can spread person-to-person and has the potential to cause “community-level” outbreaks. IT disaster recovery is not necessarily business continuity. In addition there is a good chance that the plan is out of date and that it has not been exercised in a long time. A plan walk through is no substitute for a more thorough exercise but it is a good place to start. Validate the currency of the plan and the procedures. Validate team member, roles, and responsibilities. Understand what technology and services you currently have in place.
