Planning for the Unexpected - Part 2

Getting back on topic....

Over the last week, the Washington, DC area got record breaking rain fall and it's share of power outages, floods and other issues that can interrupt your business operations. Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP) is designed to take affect when these problems occur - allowing your to transfer your systems, employees and resources to alternate sites following a planned and organized plan.

COOP planning for system failures, equipment breakdowns or facility issues are the first things that come to mind when planning for business interruptions - but the most common initiator of COOP is a power-failure. In that case, the fail-over plan is time critical and several resources could be unavailable. That is what happened at our building one night during the storms - the building lost all power. The fail-over battery systems will keep the servers and systems running for about an hour, which they did. But there was a breakdown in communication, and the IT Team was not notified, allowing the systems and servers to shut-down.

So what did we learn -- test your communication system and verify the chain of contacts to notify the emergency response team in the events that initiate your COOP. In addition, it is a good idea to have system alerts to notify key COOP Team members when problems occur during non-business hours. Don't just rely on human chain of communication, also look at technology solutions; such as an off-site computer pinging the on-site server or system. An automatic alarm and notification could have gone to key COOP and Systems Teamswhen the communication link broke.