For those of us who live along the coast, hurricane season is approaching.  That of course means dusting off those continuity plans and ensuring your company is ready in case a hurricane strikes in your area. 

I find it interesting on how different organizations view their business continuity requirements.  The most successful IT organization take the approach of letting the business decide what is required and then providing management the effort and costs associated with it. 

For instance, a business owner may feel that if a hurricane strikes in his or her area they will not be in the office that week anyway as they get their personal life in order.  Their time horizon may be 72 hours or greater to have systems available again. 

On the other hand, an organization without their ERP system may lose so much in revenue they will decide they cannot be down for more than four hours.  That organization will find the budget to ensure they have a failover plan that meets that time requirement.

And finally, for some organizations, it is more about public perception. A web site and email communication to keep in touch with customers is all that is required to sustain their business.  All else can be brought online with best effort.

Thus IT needs to avoid the trap of thinking they know best.  Let the business units decide and then design systems that meet those requirements.  Some may argue a business unit believes everything as critical and that is okay.  IT should perform their due diligence to come up with the best design and cost to meet the business requested SLA.  More times than not, it will be adjusted to something more realistic and the business unit will make a more educated decision. 

As a follow up to that, be sure to document your SLA and how you will measure it.  This is important as business leaders sometimes have short memories and they need to review a signed off agreement between themselves and IT on the details.  It also gives yourself an accurate measuring stick on how your performance will be evaluated.

The details are important!  For example, having email flowing is not the same thing as having historical mailboxes available.  You can send email without having access to all of your mailbox.  Be sure that both sides understand the expectations and agree to them in your signed document.

How do you stand on your business continuity plan?  Will you do anything different this year than you have in the past?