The Cost of a Plan

We all know that the cost of planning might be significant in terms of staff time, resources, training, etc. In this post we are going to discuss how the costs of a plan weigh against not having a plan at all.

If your company is concerned only with top line growth, they may not be overly concerned with the cost of a BC/DR project plan.  You may also find that key customers desire or demand that your company have such a plan, therefore you may argue that creating this plan could contribute to top-line growth. If you are able to capture a new customer because you have a BC/DR plan, which is clearly going to help you gain support.

On the other hand, if you work for a company strictly concerned with bottom-line growth, you may have a bigger challenge. You can certainly see that having such a plan would improve operational efficiencies or land you a new client. You may also have to point out the potential hit to the bottom line if you experience a disaster without a BC/DR plan in place.

Disasters can result in enormous losses- financial, investor confidence, and corporate image. It can also lead to serious legal issues, especially when more and more private data is being captured, stored and transmitted across the public Internet. These losses and legal challenges can have a small, short-term impact but more likely than not, they could have a significant, long-term impact – in some cases jeopardize the existence of the company.

No matter how your company looks at its revenue, you can be sure that failure to mitigate the impact of a disaster will absolutely impact both your top and bottom lines, and will likely put your company’s existence in danger.  Because of this, when you compare the cost of planning to the cost of failure, there is only one approach that makes business sense, and that is to plan to the extent that makes financial sense to do so.