Recovery Planning Considerations – Part 2
In the last post, we discussed some important Planning considerations. Today we will cover considerations of the remaining three sections: Continuity of Leadership, Insurance, and Recovery Operations.
Continuity of Leadership:
- Plan for the worst case and hope for the best. Assume that many key people will not be available in the early hours of an emergency
- Ensure that your employees know who their managers are, and manager’s managers are. It may be helpful to schedule luncheons with the staff and these managers to discuss portions of the plan.
- If employees from other company sites are in your recovery operations, bring them around to tour the site and meet with people. An introduction is important and a good start to be able to work with someone during an emergency, but the longer the stay the better.
- When exercising your plan, include scenarios where key people are not available.
Insurance – Consider the following questions:
- What sort of documentation does the insurance company require to pay a claim? Does it need copies of receipt for major equipment? If I show them a burned-out lump of metal, will the insurer believe me that it used to be an expensive server?
- In the event of a loss, exactly what do my policies require me to do?
- Am I covered if my facility is closed by order of civil authority?
- If attacked by terrorists, does the company still have a claim or is that excluded under the “acts-of-war” clause?
- Can I begin salvage operations before an adjuster arrives? How long will it take them to get here? In a wide-area emergency, how long must I wait for an adjuster?
Recovery Operations:
- Establish and maintain security at the site at all times. Prevent looting and stop people from reentering the structure before it is declared to be safe.
By considering the four sections of Planning, Continuity of Leadership, Insurance, and Recovery Options, your plan will be better suited to promptly recover and begin operations of work quickly and effectively.
Michael Herrera
Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.
Just so you really get the picture, I’ll give a third example; Your toddler walks off with your USB memory stick and then comes back looking very pleased with himself as he has placed it straight into the toilet – Disappointed doesn’t do it justice – I know what this feels like.
Tech enthusiasts can Google how to recover data from damaged data storage and find lots of info from forums and how-to websites on how to do it. Data Recovery is not easy and if you do try and do it yourself, you may need to become familiar with the phrase “hexadecimal editor” as this allows you to interrogate the file one byte at a time and by comparing the bytes from a “good file”, you could copy and paste them into the “bad” file therefore making it correct – This is a minefield!