What is a Business Continuity Plan & Why is it Needed?
According to the DRII website, a Business Continuity Plan is a management approved set of agreed to preparations and sufficient procedures for responding to a disaster. Since it’s inception during the late 1970s, the business of business-recovery has continued to expand, moving from original application processing on mainframes, to include disaster recovery for telecommunications, distributed processing, and most recently, network area and work area disaster recovery.
Nearly two-thirds of companies have experienced a significant power failure or network outage that had a direct impact on business.
| Significant power failure | 65% |
| Network outage | 65% |
| Hardware | 55% |
|
Significant critical system downtime
|
41% |
|
Application or operations error
|
40% |
| Hurricane | 33% |
| Flood | 31% |
| Terrorist event | 19% |
| Tornado | 18% |
| Explosion or other significant facility issue | 17% |
|
Denial of service attack
|
17% |
| Supply chain disruption | 14% |
| Earthquake | 13% |
| Unable to enter the facility for some reason | 9% |
| Other | 5% |
|
None of the above
|
8% |
|
Source: IDG Research 2007 -
Sungard How to Raise the Bar
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Lest the numbers above didn’t give you food for thought, when you put hard dollars to down time, these are the results that are seen across industries.
Profit-draining potential: A mere minute of downtime can bring big losses.
| Business Application | Estimated outage cost-per- minute |
| Supply Chain Management | $11,000 |
| E-Commerce | $10,000 |
| Customer Service | $3,700 |
| ATM/POS/EFT | $3,500 |
| Financial Management | $1,500 |
| Human Capital Management | $1,000 |
| Messaging | $1,000 |
| Infrastructure | $700 |
| Source: Alinean 2004 | http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/03/04/how-to-quantify-downtime |
"Lost revenue is not the only concern of business disruption; there are many other effects as well. Inability to meet your customers’ need could ultimately lead to a reduced opinion of your corporation’s image. Investor confidence and market share can be affected if you cannot be reached. A failure at your primary data center, local or wide area network isolates your internal and external customers from gaining access to critical resources." (Contingency Planning Research Inc., Computer World, August 4, 1997) My thoughts on this are not if…. but when.
Does your company have a plan?