Recovery Planning Considerations – Part 1

It is important to provide recovery considerations in your Business Continuity Plan.  We will discuss the recovery considerations in four sections: Planning, Continuity of Leadership, Insurance, and Recovery Operations.

Today we will tackle the first section of Planning.

Planning:

• Before and emergency arises, contact the disaster recovery organizations that support your type of department. They may offer some free advise worth including in your plan.
• Every department must have a plan for relocating its operations, either in the building or in another location. Your office may be moved to another location in the building, if for example there was a contained fire that only affected a particular area, or you may be able to work remotely from home but the company’s business can continue.
• Meet with your insurance carriers to discuss their requirements for damage documentation, their response time, and any limitation on your policies. Remember that different parts of the facility may have different insurance specific to their type of work.
• Meet with vendors of your equipment to understand how they can help in an emergency. Some equipment suppliers will provide you with the next device off their assembly line in the case of a serious emergency. If this is something that you wish to happen, you need to clearly understand any preconditions.
• Meet with local fire, police, and ambulance services. Determine what short of response time you should expect in an emergency from each. Understand how long it will take for the civil authorities to arrive may indicate how long the containment effort must allow for.
• Consider shifting business functions to other sites in case of an emergency. The effort is not trivial and may require considerable expense in travel and accommodations, but the goal is to promptly restore services.

Each of these steps can provide valuable information for your plan-development.  Next post we will discuss the other three sections.