CIOReview | | 19 DECEMBER - JANUARYAs we rely ever more on digital technology, the trend is moving away from human managed interfaces and towards utilizing machines and automated processesdowntime impacts on facility, people and process outages, and sets the recovery priority for critical processes and technology. Below are some examples where technology advances have enabled better contingency options:Facility outageIf you lose your facility--to fire, power outage, damage, etc, you need to understand the impact on your organization and how employees will resume working in the timeframe identified in your BIA. In the past, hiring a vendor who provided an alternate office--desk/phone/equipment/Internet--was the primary option. Companies paid to reserve space that they might never use, and because they were typically subscription based, you may have had to contend with sharing that space with other companies in a regional outage. Today, there are many options for your employees to connect remotely to your network using a laptop with a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN), or a cloud based virtual desktop--Amazon Work Space- AWS, Citrix, VMWare, vCenter and others--which allows the employee to access a URL on their home device to securely connect to their company's network.Employee safetyIf you need to communicate with your employees for any disruptive event--to tell them not to report to their primary facility, that the power is out, or to find out if they are safe in a severe weather event--using a Phone Tree is cumbersome, hard to maintain and time consuming. Consider using an (EMNS) Emergency Mass Notification System (Everbridge, OnSolve, MIR3 and others). EMNS simplifies the process of reaching your employee base using multiple delivery methods (phone/SMS/email) on work and personal contact information. You can tell when the employees receive the message and how they confirmed receipt as well as enable two-way communication to ensure the safety of your employees. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) is also a cheap and easy way for companies to communicate to many customers--e.g. the public sector or utility companies. Private companies don't typically communicate outage information on social media for fear of exposing information not for public consumption.BCM softwareAlthough business continuity Management (BCM) software has been around for 15+ years, not every company invests in it. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Risk Assessments can be done in Excel, Business Continuity Plans can be written in SharePoint or Word. However, this is generally time consuming and hard to collect the data to identify trends and make decisions on a corporate level. With office productivity tools, impact analysis is nearly impossible. BCM software solutions--Strategic BCP, Avalution, Assurance and others--provide several advantages; most importantly, the software stores your data outside of your network--how will you access your plans if your systems are down?. The methodology facilitates the planning process, empowers accountability of the plan owners and allows for aggregated reporting. Some software companies include BIA, BCP, Risk Assessment, DR, Crisis Management and Vendor Risk and Contingency Management components in one package, covering most of the key elements of a business continuity management program.The FutureAs we rely ever more on digital technology, the trend is moving away from human managed interfaces and towards utilizing machines and automated processes. More alerts, more auto-failovers, more synergies and communications between systems. In an instant gratification world, it is not hard to imagine that technology advancements will continue to grow at a fast rate. However, I still foresee that people and their expertise will be needed in the decision-making and communications process which will be key to protecting brand, business operations, customers and shareholders.
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