May 3rd, 2007 - News Article

Business Viewpoint: Disaster recovery preparedness crucial for businesses

By JOHN PARSONS
5/3/2007  10:31 AM

While events that can cause interruptions or glitches at businesses loom year-round, it's the springtime tornado season that really brings the topic of disaster recovery into focus for business owners and employees alike.

Mother Nature isn't singling out the great state of Oklahoma -- virtually every part of the country has natural disasters to fret about, from hurricanes on the East and Gulf coasts to earthquakes on the West Coast.

But what's most surprising is that natural disasters cause less than 5 percent of all business interruptions nationwide. These events can vary in scope, from short-term power failure to a complete facility loss.

Taking the lion's share of the blame, either directly or indirectly, are manmade causes ranging from chemical spills to terrorist attacks. Sixteen months ago, dozens of downtown Tulsa businesses shared this experience when a water main break resulted in power and communications losses for days.

With today's reliance on information technology, even a single wrong keystroke, whether by accident or sabotage, can bring down entire networks, effectively freezing productivity for what seems like indefinite periods. Unfortunately, most of these crippling events

don't have a particular season -- management and/or business owners must worry about them 365 days a year.

These events can be extremely costly in terms of revenue, reputation and resources. And that's only when a business is able to recover at all. More than 80 percent of the businesses substantially affected by Hurricane Katrina, and without a business continuity plan in place, never recovered.

So it's easy to understand why having an effective, routinely updated and tested business continuity plan is so critical for every organization.

Unfortunately, a company with just such a plan is the exception rather than the rule. It's not because management chose to roll the dice with shareholder assets, but simply because of the complexities that surround the creation and testing of truly effective plans.

A plan's creation process alone requires that an organization objectively evaluate areas where it is vulnerable, department by department, taking into account both physical and technical concerns.

It would be cost prohibitive to include an elimination and/or mitigation strategy for each area of vulnerability found. Rather, each area requires a cost-benefit analysis. This quantifies the fiscal and physical impact to an organization based on that particular area of vulnerability and compares it with the cost of creating a recovery solution.

Once the evaluation is complete, a plan continuity process must be created. This plan must provide specific response instructions for employees to follow during an emergency.

These protocols must encompass all potential personal safety, technology and general business events specific to an organization. The plan must identify and document specific procedures for efficient, cost-effective recovery of disrupted infrastructures, systems, data and processes.

It's easy to see that while the goal of a business continuity plan is simple -- to minimize down time while protecting employee welfare and company assets -- creating the simple solution is not.

And, of course, creating the plan is just the first step in the process. We have yet to take into account the complexities of deploying each phase of the plan, keeping employees properly trained to use it, and regularly testing and updating the plan.

Regardless of the complexities in creating, testing and maintaining an effective business continuity plan, it certainly beats the alternative when a disaster is headed your way.

John Parsons is CEO of Perimeter Technology, which manages corporate information technology infrastructure via data centers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

To inquire about writing a Business Viewpoint column, e-mail a short outline of the article to Business Editor John Stancavage at john.stancavage@tulsaworld.com. The column should focus on a business trend; outlook for the city, state or industry; or discuss a topic of interest in a particular area of expertise. Articles should not promote the writer's business or be overtly political.

By JOHN PARSONS

« Back to Article List