Is your Business Continuity Program ready for anything?

When you prepared your Business Continuity Program plans you looked at the various risks and potential disasters to your company. You knew you could not protect against every one of the scenarios so you had to assess what types of events could occur in your area.

We have the typical natural disasters of floods, hurricanes, snowstorms, but most disasters that happen are of a more “mundane” type. Hardware and software failures are two potential types of events, but one of the most potentially damaging types of events that could put you out of business is a power failure.

All information technology systems run on electricity. Without the main supply, your systems have to shut down. You may have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) but these will only allow you to shut down your systems in a controlled manner, they will not keep you operational. To truly remain operational after a power outage, you would need to install a backup generator.

In most areas, the power is usually very reliable. However, there is always the possibility of a major outage, especially if you are in a hurricane, winter storm area or sometimes, a high concentration urban area. Think of areas that have had rolling blackouts or brownouts.

Plan how you would at least shut down your servers properly in the event of a power outage.

Tags: BCP plan development, BCP planning, business continuity planning, business continuity program, continuity plan development, continuity planning, continuity program development, disaster recovery planning, power failures, regional disaster planning, small business continuity planning