Ensuring that your business continues to serve customers
in spite of the myriad plagues of our time - summer floods, autumn
leaves on the line, and retro industrial disputes - is maturing
into a discipline that calls upon IT more than any other
function.
However, business continuity should not just be about
technology. As we report on page 8, risks to humans, such as viral
infections, transport disruptions, and even kidnapping, are often
overlooked in organisations' continuity plans. Moreover, since
being global is increasingly a business imperative, globetrotting
senior executives and their Blackberries will become more and more
vulnerable.
Business continuity is the subject of this issue's special
report on page 30. It paints a mixed but largely gloomy picture of
IT organisations failing their own disaster recovery tests, and
chief executives fiddling while Rome burns. Nevertheless, there is
also a lot of creativity around continuity planning - and not just
in large businesses.
Small and medium-sized enterprises have suffered badly this
year, especially in the areas that were flooded, but also
universally during the postal strike. The
Federation of Small Businesses
attests that 94% of its members use the
Royal Mail exclusively, and many do not have contingency
plans.
In response, some SMEs have turned to the technologies of remote
working and
outsourcing. As
well as ensuring business continuity, firms are finding that these
approaches can deliver security, efficiency and broader business
benefits. Similarly, compliance with data protection regulation is
forcing upon SMEs an attention to data storage that might not
otherwise be there.
The messages of our special report are that business continuity
is not a discipline conditioned only by catastrophe and terrorist
attack, but also by more mundane disruptions and that SMEs have
much to gain by intensifying their focus upon it.