As your business continuity planners work on their 2010 projects, you may be facing an organizational decision soon regarding whether or not you will move to the current “Cloud Computing” environment.

To help your teams prepare for that situation, you should read a recent article posted on the Network Computing website.  In this article, written by Satish Joshi, and as one of the very first considerations for a company to review, he goes on to state,

“It is therefore of paramount importance to decide what exactly you are trying to do by ‘moving computing into the cloud.’ The computing cloud can be viewed at three different levels of abstraction:

• At the bottom level, the cloud is simply a virtualized data center that offers you variable capacity for computing, storage, communications etc
• At the middle level, the cloud is a whole platform including the middleware (apps servers, ESB, etc) and a complete application development environment
• At the top level, the cloud actually provides complete business process functionality with variable capacity and service levels on demand. Your roadmap and cost benefit equations will be completely different depending which layers you wish to utilize.”

Click here to read more about this current topic so relevant to the needs of today’s business continuity and risk management team members.

Many areas of risk must be taken into account by business continuity planners.  One of the often overlooked risks is to realize the rising trend of eDiscovery activities in companies large and small.  With so many regulatory and compliance requirements in place and continuing to grow in number, many companies are struggling just to keep current with those demands let alone actually be able to claim full compliance with them.  And, when the need for producing records from an eDiscovery process and legal hold occur, all companies must be fully aware of the economic penalties (risks) that could be thrown upon the them if they cannot comply with those requirements on a timely basis.  Many small and mid-size businesses might risk being forced to close their doors if the economic penalities are too large.  As you would expect the drivers for the changes in recent eDiscovery strategies are economically driven. 

As a result, we believe that BC planning teams need to be aware of current strategies being presented for eDiscovery.   Recent events and developments indicate that many companies, who have delegated eDiscovery to outside legal firms, are now seriously considering moving eDiscovery away from those firms and creating an in-house capability to meet their eDiscovery requirements.  All of those decisions are made because they are seeking lower eDiscovery costs.

Certainly, compaies will need guidance on how and what to bring in-house, and how and what to outsource.   Most importantly, companies will use only those resources that grasp how to drive efficiencies through their eDiscovery processes.  And, while this dynamic creates opportunities, it also presents an uncertain world to vendors and law firms that don’t figure out how to adapt on a timely basis.

We recommend reading a recent posting by G. J. Britton on this subject for all members of BC planning teams having to wrestle with finding a solution for their company to this e-Discovery risk mitigation challenge.  READ THIS ARTICLE.

Several of our readers have commented that we should remind everyone about an earlier posting that cited the CBS News Disaster Link website ….. we totally agree with the recommendation and hope that our readers also make sure that this site is a resource for all of their business continuity planning groups.