Gone are the days of downloading a business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan from the Internet and hoping it will suffice.
So says Tracey Linnell, general manager for advisory services at ContinuitySA. "Without a business continuity plan in place, the basic survival of a company over the medium to long term is at risk.
"We are operating in a landscape with increasing complexity and risk and, therefore, we cannot be blind to the fact that more incidents will occur and if we haven't adequately planned for, rehearsed and maintained business continuity and disaster recovery arrangements on an ongoing basis, we may just become another 'failed' statistic," she says.
She points out the initial symptoms of no continuity solution will be major operational downtime, chaos, lack of prioritisation for business recovery, loss of stakeholder confidence, negative publicity, disgruntled staff and customers, significant financial loss as a result of this, or even a breach of regulations, which can ultimately lead to the closure of the organisation.
To measure the current landscape for business continuity and disaster recovery in SA, ContinuitySA and ITWeb have unveiled the Business Resilience 2014 Survey. Additional objectives include observing change and growth in business continuity maturity, as well as identifying various trends and changes occurring from one year to the next. This means we can be more responsive to our clients' changing needs, says Linnell.
'"If we fail to plan, then we plan to fail', Benjamin Franklin said it best, and it really does summarise the core concepts of business continuity, which are prepare, respond and recover," she says.
"If we do not put sufficient planning in place before an incident occurs, how will we know what to do when it happens? And, ultimately, how do we know if we are capable of recovering from the incident?"
Linnell notes the benefits of business continuity include reducing single points of failure and mitigation of key risk(s) ahead of an incident, thereby reducing the cost/effort should something occur. The other benefits are greater understanding of dependencies with suppliers which can influence SLA terms and conditions, increased sense of security for various stakeholders that the continuity of the business has been properly addressed, and that their vested interests are being protected (jobs, investments, community, environment etc), she adds.
According to Linnell, in the past, the financial sector in SA was the clear leader in implementing disaster recovery and business continuity solutions due to fairly stringent legislation in terms of Basel, Sarbanes Oxley and local legislation.
However, she says, over the last decade, organisations across the broad spectrum of industries have begun the journey of business continuity implementation as they acknowledge the world now basically operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
"Organisations have increasingly realised not only are their own business continuity plans important, but they need to ensure their supply chain has acceptable plans in place too. Overall, many organisations are still not yet mature in their approach, although this will change as business continuity is receiving more and more emphasis at the board level of organisations."
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