The Canterbury earthquake is a dramatic reminder of the need to plan for the unexpected – to ensure your business can continue in the face of a major disruption. But it’s not only large-scale natural disasters we need to think about. We’re more likely to be hit an everyday event – like a flooded server room, a cut cable, or a CBD power outage. How would your business cope in a crisis? We bring you a checklist for getting prepared.
No-one could have predicted the 7.1 quake rocked Canterbury in the early hours on September 4 – but many businesses were prepared for it nonetheless.
Gen-i’s Head of South Island Sales, Paul Deavoll, says much of the potential damage on business operations had been minimised by sound planning.
“Most of our key business clients in Christchurch were quite well-prepared, and as a result, were essentially unaffected. We’d previously worked with our larger clients to move some of their infrastructure into our two local data centres – which are incredibly robust buildings, capable of surviving a much larger quake.”
As well as providing around-the-clock support to their business clients, Gen-i also played a key role in the city’s impressive post-quake response. Other Gen-i clients include the Christchurch City Council, Fire Service, Police, and Canterbury District Health Board. For example, when the response effort formed its temporary base at the Art Gallery – causing an influx of cellphones - Gen-i quickly arranged installation of a mobile cell site to provide additional coverage and capacity
There’s no time like the present to get your business prepared. Here’s an overview of what Gen-i recommends for developing a Business Continuity plan.
- Sit down and assess. The first step is to assess the impact on your business processes. What would be the cost to the business if this process or service is disrupted? When calculating the cost of downtime, consider factors such as: potential lost revenue, damaged reputation, and the costs of resolving any flow-on effects.
- Calculate your risk. The cost of mitigating all potential risk is huge, so you need to be practical. Your impact assessment should highlight your most crucial processes and systems. You need to decide what’s non-negotiable, versus acceptable ‘collateral damage’.
- Plan for staff to keep working. Apart from getting your computing systems and data back online, you need to think about how staff will work. Remote working and mobility solutions can be highly valuable. You may need to provide an alternative work environment for key employees, such as customer service teams. (When Auckland city lost power for almost an entire day in 2006, Gen-i moved staff to other locations).
- Get creative with virtualisation. Virtualisation and use of Cloud-based technology can help you bounce back from a crisis faster. With a virtualised environment, you can get your systems back up and running within minutes instead of hours, or even days. The same goes for Cloud-based systems – because they can be accessed from any web or VPN connection, your staff can easily operate from an alternative worksite.
- Look at the bigger picture. Business continuity planning isn’t just about technology. A good plan should address the four areas of: asset protection, safeguarding against financial loss, business compliance, and legal protection.
- Test that it works. No matter how good your plan looks on paper, it must rise to the challenge when crisis hits. Test your plan regularly. (At Gen-i, we run crisis simulations from senior leadership down to check for cracks in our recovery systems).