Bouncing Back From Disaster

Mike Rouleau, tw telecom'ssenior vice president of business development and strategy, believes that business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) programs are part of developing "business resiliency" — an ability to think through various scenarios that can affect business operations and actively prepare for them.

Natural disasters are the first type of event that usually comes to mind, but "there are other factors you may not have thought of," says Rouleau — like the fact that 40 percent of business-interrupting disasters are caused by hardware failure, and 30 percent can be chalked up to good old-fashioned human error.

Developing a BCDR plan that works

To develop a successful BCDR program for "always on," mission-critical communications, Rouleau recommends following these steps:

• Sponsorship: Get an executive sponsor for the plan — preferably a CFO, for example, instead of someone else inside the IT department to be solely responsible for BCDR.
• Planning: Build a plan, test it, manage it and use the results for continuous improvements — don't just test once and then put the plan on the shelf.
• Technology Awareness: Leverage technologies like Ethernet and VOIP for connectivity. VOIP phones are easily portable, which make them ideal for relocating to a backup facility.

Downtime can be devastating, but advance planning can help ensure that your business weathers the storm — or whatever disaster may come — with as little disruption as possible.