No company should have IT alone manage its business continuity management (BCM) strategy, says Jorgen Nielsen, director of ContinuitySA.
"Companies tend to lump BCM into the IT sphere, but its businesspeople who should be creating an overall strategy," he says.
Nielsen says the problem is that IT often forgets to include its own tools in the BCM strategy, while recovery of these tools is most often critical for the business to run effectively.
"For example, IT sometimes does not make provision for blank backup tapes on the disaster recovery site, so they can't do backups," he says.
He adds that because IT staff do not always consider the entire business, they tend to make small mistakes such as not storing printing supplies such as letterheads offsite, which for some companies can be extremely important to ensuring business continuity.
Nielsen says that an IT-focused BCM strategy is not the only mistake that companies make. He says that businesses often don't complete a detailed business impact analysis.
Instead, Nielsen says companies commonly send out questionnaires to determine recovery needs, but these generally yield poor results because they tend to be left to the last minute and poorly understood by department heads.
He says that these mistakes can be avoided by appointing a person trained in BCM and disaster recovery. He adds that companies should also look at appointing a committee that touches all parts of the business, to help implement a good recovery strategy.
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