Contingency Planning / Business Continuity
Businesses may fail if they don’t have an operational contingency plan for a known or unknown event that disrupts normal business operations and progressive development life cycle. Some examples of known and unknown events (triggers) are:
- Known Natural events; such as, hurricane, floods
- Planned power and network outages
- Unknown natural events; such as, earthquakes, fires
- Workforce (employee) sickness/death
- Software virus, airborne virus (SARS), war
- Power outage, network disruption
Known and unknown events usually impact a business in two ways:
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Operational Outage - This outage is triggered by a known and unknown event that leads to disruption of operational business functions. Operational business functions are related to daily workforce and business products operational activities. In companies that are driven by information technology, a normal business outage would impact production operations for the workforce and may cause a significant financial damage. The length of the operational outage may vary from a few hours to few days or months. If appropriate response plans and mitigation steps are not planned or considered, it may lead to closure or shutdown of company operations.
- Development Outage - This outage is triggered by a known and unknown event that leads to a disruption of future development of new business products. Development outage usually does not impact operational business functions; however, may delay the launch of new products. Most companies have separate resources and locations for the development of new functions/products as compared to the resources and locations of company operations/existing products.
Depending on the size of the company and its locations, an outage event could trigger a location (single building; multi-building; multi-location) outage or a regional outage (wide regions; entire country). In order to mitigate a regional outage most information/technology companies invest in recovery sites located at different time zones. Most are also migrating to the data centers/cloud that is located in different timezones or locations while maintaining security. Consumer product companies create development centers located and staffed in different time zones or locations.
We have the expertise to define and test preventive and corrective contingency/business resiliency and risk management plans. We shall execute table top exercises to validate your procedures and playbooks. For a sample playbook click here
Call or email us info@techontime.com to learn more.