Why Don't We Do It in the Road Ahead? —Part 3, Security Enhancement > Business continuity planning

First principle of business continuity planning: how much of your work—currently in process and accumulated working knowledge—can you afford to do over?

The most likely answer is, "Not very much." According to a study by North American Emergency Management, "...following a major disaster 60% of businesses do not reopen their doors." Even comparatively minor downtime and disruption can impair businesses' financial health and ability to serve clients. A study by systems vendor StorageTek found that "80% of downtime is caused by hardware failure or operational errors caused by people," while only 5% is caused by disasters such as fire, flood, earthquake and so on.

However, disruptions such as earthquakes or acts of terrorism, while having a very low likelihood of occurrence, have catastrophic consequences—such as the total loss of all of a business' systems, records, premises and perhaps even key personnel. Other disruptions, such as local power failures or accidental erasure/overwriting of important files, may be more likely to occur but less catastrophic in their consequences. The keys to successful business continuity planning, therefore, are to:

identify all potential sources of disruption

categorize each according to its likelihood of occurrence and extent of its consequences

allocate recovery resources in proportion to a weighted combination of the odds of occurrence and the threat level posed.

Viewed this way, business continuity planning is a superset of what we usually think of as "security."

Page 1, Business continuity planning

Page 2, Computus interruptus

Page 3, Backing up is hard to do

Page 4, The road to recovery