How does an effective Business Continuity and Recovery program ...

If you are like me, you are sick and tired of hearing about the NFL Labor issues and are ready for all of that to be put to bed so we can enjoy some football again. In the mean time, and to replace the football gap in all of our lives, I wanted to discuss how an effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery program relates to a winning football team.

Let?s first start with taking a look at the NFL and what makes a championship team so successful. All teams have three specific ?teams? ? Offense, Defense and Special Teams ? led by a collection of management and coaches. Within each of these ?teams? there are sub groups or positions, such as the secondary, wide receivers or linebackers, who also come with a host of coaches and trainers. One of the keys that sets the Super Bowl teams apart is that all of the ?teams?, sub groups, coaches and management work towards a common goal and understand the role that each ?team? plays and how everyone supports each other.

A Business can be looked at in similar terms to the NFL, and specifically, an effective Business Continuity and Recovery Program. An effective program contains four specific ?teams? ? Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management and Emergency Management ? led by a collection of corporate leaders and influenced by additional departments, such as Risk Management and Compliance. Each of these ?teams? has sub groups, which in Disaster Recovery for example, may include specific applications, infrastructure, data and Internet groups, amongst other system owners and business stakeholders. Similar to the NFL, in effective Continuity and Recovery program, all of these teams work hand in hand every day feeding each other information back and forth.

In the same way that a losing football team lacks a clear vision and identity, many corporations without effective Continuity and Recovery do not fully understand the roles that each team plays and the interdependencies between each. There is often confusion between roles in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, for example IT focusing on Business issues, which is similar to the Defensive Coordinator worrying about the Offense. This often turns into contention within the office, but if all sides understood their roles they would be able to work together as one team to support each other. As a starting point, here are some basic role definitions of each of the four Continuity and Recovery ?teams?:

• Business Continuity ? Program to identify the critical processes that need to be continued, and develop, maintain and exercise plans to continue, recover and restore business operations
• Disaster Recovery ? Program to develop, maintain and exercise plans to continue, recover and restore IT services to support Business Continuity, including components such as infrastructure, telecomm, systems, applications and data
• Crisis Management ? Process, structure and coordination of an organization?s response to a crisis in an effective and timely manner, including employees, stakeholders and the public
• Emergency Management ? Planning and response to protect critical assets and employees from hazardous events, such as evacuation during a fire or shelter in place during a tornado

One of the most important aspects of an effective Continuity and Recovery Program is the communication between the key ?teams? and ensuring that all of the ?teams? are working together as one complete team towards the common goal of protecting the business, including it?s people, stakeholders and assets.

Source: http://blog.integrity.us.com/?p=303

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