Agility Recovery Solutions: 10 misconceptions about disaster recovery

Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions, a Snack­box PR client, offers great infor­ma­tion regard­ing busi­ness inter­rup­tion plan­ning. Read on to learn more.

Paul Sul­li­van has seen it all. A 25-year vet­eran of dis­as­ter recov­ery and busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity man­age­ment, Sul­li­van wit­nessed the growth of con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning among the For­tune 1000 in the 1980s. He watched, first hand, the suc­cesses and fail­ures of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans fol­low­ing the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 and in 2005 through­out the most active hur­ri­cane sea­son in recorded his­tory. Today, Sul­li­van is help­ing small and medium-sized com­pa­nies plan for and recover after sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness interruptions.

“Con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning has always been asso­ci­ated with big busi­ness,” said Sul­li­van, Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­eral Man­ager, Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions. “We’re using the same knowl­edge, strate­gies and tac­tics we devel­oped with the For­tune 1000 and imple­ment­ing them among small and medium-sized busi­nesses across North America.”

Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions, a for­mer divi­sion of Gen­eral Elec­tric, focuses plan­ning and recov­ery efforts on small and medium-sized busi­nesses, though the com­pany con­tin­ues to do work with giants such as IBM and HP.

Why Busi­ness Con­ti­nu­ity? Why now?
Accord­ing to Sul­li­van, busi­ness of all sizes and indus­tries need to think about con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning. Beyond the busi­ness as a whole, own­ers and man­agers should take into account the future of their employ­ees, clients or cus­tomers, stake­hold­ers and beyond.

But, the major­ity of small busi­ness own­ers have numer­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties and con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning usu­ally falls off the radar, accord­ing to Sullivan.

“An organization’s lead­er­ship team typ­i­cally doesn’t know where to start in plan­ning for busi­ness inter­rup­tions, so they decide to put it off. Or, there are more vis­i­ble issues that require imme­di­ate atten­tion, allow­ing dis­as­ter plan­ning to fall to the way­side,” said Sul­li­van. “The ini­tial plan­ning process is an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to bring the lead­er­ship team together to dis­cuss your busi­ness, your needs and objectives.”

Mis­con­cep­tions About Con­ti­nu­ity Plan­ning
Many busi­ness lead­ers hold mis­con­cep­tions about con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning. In response to lack of knowl­edge and plan­ning, Sul­li­van com­piled a list of the top-ten misconceptions:

1. “We can get by with what we have” – Busi­ness lead­ers do not make an accu­rate assess­ment of what is nec­es­sary for recov­ery plan­ning and response. Many think work­ing from home is a suit­able recov­ery tac­tic. This may be accept­able for a day or two, but there are rea­sons why a busi­ness has an office, includ­ing the need to col­lab­o­rate and have a cen­tral point of operations.

2. “We can get by with­out an oper­at­ing front office” – Accounts receiv­able, cus­tomer ser­vice and beyond must be run­ning full-force at every type of com­pany for busi­ness and ser­vice to con­tinue. It takes an oper­at­ing front office to make money and keep clients happy.

3. “We have mul­ti­ple loca­tions and don’t need a recov­ery plan” – An office for 10 peo­ple will not accom­mo­date 40 employ­ees eas­ily. The strat­egy behind open­ing mul­ti­ple offices is there for a rea­son and if one or more go down, it cre­ates a kink (or kinks) in the entire system.

4. “As an exec­u­tive, we can solve prob­lems as they hap­pen” – If they haven’t planned in advance to recover their busi­ness, they don’t take all aspects and results into rea­son­able con­sid­er­a­tion. Dur­ing a cri­sis it is easy to move too fast and miss impor­tant steps along the way, such as iden­ti­fy­ing the best inter­ests of employ­ees, the need for basic tech­nol­ogy and acti­vat­ing the most crit­i­cal func­tions of the busi­ness. A well thought-out plan is the best solu­tion for ensur­ing the fastest, smartest and most eco­nom­i­cal recovery.

5. “Data backup is plenty” – Lead­ers for­get that they will need tech­nol­ogy to access the backed-up infor­ma­tion, the peo­ple to recov­ery the data, as well as a place to use the tech­nol­ogy. Some­thing as sim­ple as a pipe burst can wipe out servers, com­put­ers, print­ers, fax machines and more, not to men­tion the office space itself. A recov­ery plan iden­ti­fies all aspects of get­ting the busi­ness back up-and-running in a timely fashion.

6. “A dis­as­ter or sig­nif­i­cant inter­rup­tion will never hap­pen to us” – It’s actu­ally the lit­tle things that can cre­ate chaos. A fire, a storm, an elec­tri­cal out­age. Busi­ness inter­rup­tions can’t be pre­dicted, but you can pre­pare for them. Accord­ing to Rough Notes, an insur­ance trade pub­li­ca­tion, busi­nesses are more likely to expe­ri­ence a sig­nif­i­cant inter­rup­tion due to power out­ages and tech­nol­ogy fail­ure than due to weather-related events.

7. “We don’t need to have a plan in place because we’re hun­dreds of miles from a hurricane-prone area” – A dis­as­ter is any type of event that can inter­rupt a busi­ness, includ­ing some­thing as com­mon as a power out­age, fire or failed server to some­thing as large as a hur­ri­cane, tor­nado or terrorism.

8. “Our insur­ance com­pany will cover every­thing” – The insur­ance com­pany will make sure you have the money to get up-and-running in weeks or months after the inter­rup­tion occur­rence, but what hap­pens to your busi­ness in the mean­time? Unless you’re up-and-running, your cus­tomers or clients will take their busi­ness elsewhere.

9. “We cre­ated a backup/recovery plan years ago. We’re fine” – Con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning is an evolv­ing process. Part of the process is to test the cur­rent plan and to ensure it is up-to-date and exe­cutable. With­out test­ing, there’s no assur­ance the plan will work.

10. “The plan­ning process is time con­sum­ing and waste­ful” – Con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning can be com­pleted in seg­ments, over time, with a group of peo­ple. There’s no set time­frame for the plan­ning process and it can be as flex­i­ble as you need it to be. Resources like those avail­able on Ready.org make estab­lish­ing a plan sim­ple and painless.

Sul­li­van encour­ages every busi­ness owner and man­ager to learn more about con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning from resources such as Ready.gov and the Amer­i­can Red Cross.

About Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions
Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions is a lead­ing provider of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity solu­tions to small and medium-sized busi­nesses across North Amer­ica. At time of busi­ness inter­rup­tion, Agility pro­vides its mem­bers with the space, power, con­nec­tiv­ity and tech­nol­ogy needed to resume oper­a­tions. The com­pany has a 100-percent suc­cess rate in recov­er­ing its mem­bers after inter­rup­tions. Agility responds to inter­rup­tions caused by hur­ri­canes, fires, floods, power out­ages, server fail­ures and more. Visit AgilityRecovery.com for more information.