In my experience, many organizations are continuously struggling to adopt business continuity and disaster recovery plan due to organizational resistance to spending the time and money necessary to develop a thorough and actionable plan. More companies have come to a basic understanding that BC/DR planning is just a mandatory business requirement. Clearly, some businesses that have been impacted by disasters, whether man-made or natural, have gotten serious account BC/DR. That said, there still appear to be a huge opportunity for infrastructure improvement across all businesses and industries.
Financial industries pretty much lead the pack when it comes to BC/DR, primarily because of the cost of downtime and the enormous potential financial impact of a disaster. One recent example would be from our financial services client, which are now fully electronic, have fairly robust failover systems, backup scenarios, and have the ability to run the business from any one of a number of national locations. At first, their management was very skeptic and wanted only to capitalize on existing obsolete BC/DR plan until explained.
You might be surprised that many of actual customers meet the requirement “on Paper” but if hard-pressed to actually implement their plans. Some have plans that are now a decade old or obsolete. Many other have plans that were never fully formed and are still sitting on a file share someplace gathering electronic dust.
The bottom line is that it’s still difficult to get business leaders and executives to willingly spend money and resources on BC/DR planning and implementing the risk-mitigating strategies. It’s gotten easier over the past decade, but challenges remain. On the upside, advances in the BC/DR technology, from virtualization to all manner of cloud services, have enabled the companies to spend their IT dollars more effectively and build BC/DR into their high availability computing systems.
It’s time to introduce industrial regulations across all segments by replicating successful BC/DR implementations as a mandatory requirement for all new and existing businesses. If this regulation can be made required by law, it will have more impact on adopting BC/DR as a mandatory implementation which will save vital electronic assets for businesses across many industries and will assist in streamlining the operations using all preventing measures.
