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By Alex von Tiesenhausen and Andrew Farmer

Business continuity planning has changed dramatically over the past five years. The 1998 ice storm in southern Quebec and eastern Ontario, the terrorist attacks of 2001, SARS and the power blackout in 2003 taught us all an important lesson: Business continuity planning must be a high priority in any organization. While disaster recovery for core production computer systems is important, a business continuity plan must also include contingencies for all critical business functions, such as telecommunications, facilities, accounting, contact information and historical records. The most important factor in ensuring the continuity of any business, however, is a motivated and highly knowledgeable work force.

Times have changed and it's now very likely that an organization will, at some time, experience an extended outage. Until recently, major disease outbreaks, large-scale natural disasters and terrorist attacks were considered unlikely occurrences in Canada. Businesses must now prepare for these as well as for all of the localized problems such as building power failures, environmental systems failures, UPS failures, fire damage, water damage, computer systems failures, human error and outages at network service providers. These days, it's best to assume that everything will fail eventually and plan accordingly.

Organizations need to develop extensive business continuity plans in order to protect themselves. These plans must be tested regularly for both technical and organization weaknesses. Funding of high-availability systems and disaster recovery environments is often a challenge, as these resources will be used only in the event of primary failures.

To reduce costs and improve reliability, many organizations with multiple office locations have begun to channel production workloads to the systems formerly used exclusively for disaster recovery. By using these systems daily, they are assured of availability during a real disaster.

Management and staff must be available to operate the business during a real disaster. Toward that end, some organizations ensure that a rotating team of employees capable of running the business are, at all times, working from locations outside the primary facility. It's also important that provisions be made for staff to travel to or between facilities during a disaster or outage and that a strong inter-communication strategy is in place to ensure that staff can remain in contact with one another while coordinating continuity activities.

Over the past ten years, FundSERV has had occasion to rely on each of its existing emergency systems: generator power, failover hosts, redundant network routers, back-up circuits, UPS power, environmental monitors, emergency call lists, secondary pagers, surge protectors, back-up air conditioners, and remote office connectivity. Some of these systems have literally paid for themselves after just one incident.

As future outages are likely, if not inevitable, FundSERV is continuously striving to improve and update all strategies, procedures and systems to further reduce risk for its customers.

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