Justifying a Business Continuity Plan

Traditionally, a major hurdle in implementing or upgrading a BC/DR plan has been budget approval. The recent economic downturn forced many organizations to reduce costs, and the BC/DR plan was usually high on the cut list. This approach contradicts the fundamental goal of a BC/DR plan – company survival. With money already being tight, an interruption of the revenue stream could be disastrous, so a BC/DR plan is essential.

Today’s advancements in technology make budget approval a lot easier. An infrastructure that would have been very expensive using legacy technologies and something only considered for a BC/DR plan is now common for everyday operations. VoIP, FoIP, unified communications, virtualization and SaaS (News - Alert) are now fully implemented in many companies. Home offices, a fundamental element of a BC/DR plan, are more prevalent than ever. In other words, a significant part of a BC/DR plan may already be in place.

Usually, Step 1 of a plan is to define what is critical for an organization, such as revenue preservation, customer retention, etc. Step 2 is the presentation of the list of critical needs to management. The next steps would be a plan draft and the estimated cost of implementation. In today’s environment, an interim step, Step 1.5, needs to be inserted. This new step will be an inventory of the plan elements already in place or about to be implemented. For example, do you have Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS, Hyper-V, Exchange, SQL Server, VMware, Cisco Call Manager and the number of employees with home offices? Getting budget approval is always easier if you are already 75 percent there. Use the checklist to evaluate your current position. Don’t forget hosted services like VoIP, FoIP and SaaS, as they are non-capital-investment alternatives to filling in the missing elements. IT

Max Schroeder (News - Alert) is the senior vice president of FaxCore Inc. (www.faxcore.com) and managing director of the DPCF.

Rich Tehrani is the president and group editor-in-chief at TMC (News - Alert), and conference chairman of ITEXPO.

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