There seems to be a trend these days for spotting five things that we have learnt from any given event. I don’t know why five things rather than say ten. Maybe it’s because after that number people start to get bored these days.
Well, I certainly don’t want to bore anyone, so I will stick to five things for my list, which is what to watch out for in your business continuity planning. This list is the result of many years of experience in business continuity/disaster recovery work, mostly helping companies who have suffered some kind of catastrophic IT failure.
The first thing to look out for, or expect, is the unexpected. In my last blog I talked about so-called ‘black swan’ events. These are events that are totally unexpected in that they are beyond the frame of reference of most people, like the ideas of black swans was in medieval times. They tend to have a massive impact on an organisation, but even so are often not learnt from. You need to acknowledge that you cannot predict or plan for every eventuality, but you can prepare yourself so that whatever happens you have a fighting chance of surviving it.