Business Continuity Planning Under Enterprise Content Management Systems
Business continuity is more than just disaster recovery.
In the modern enterprise context, disaster recovery has come to mean putting operations back after an IT system crash or serious data damage. Because business operations in an enterprise context are critically dependent on IT resources, such a crash or damage can bring business to a halt.
Business continuity planning seeks to avoid the eventuality of businesses having to stop even if such disruptions occur. The aim is to keep the business running 24/7 whatever happens. How this can be achieved is the focus of business continuity planning exercise.
How Does ECM Help Business Continuity?
Enterprise Content Management systems create central repositories of all content, separate from the repositories used by transaction systems. This in itself serves as a safeguard against having to stop business operations in case a business-critical transactional database becomes unreadable.
Business critical information is identified and stored in a manner that helps restoration in the event of loss of primary sources of the information. Offline backups in separate locations, and redundant, online, mirrored systems separated by distance and power sources are some of the precautions adopted.
The key determinant in selecting the practices is the speed with which the content needs to be put back to avoid stoppage of business operations.
Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity is typically viewed as a distraction from regular business focus. As a result business continuity planning and actions tend to get postponed, forever. The first requirement hence is to change this approach. Top management must recognize the real significance of business continuity planning in today’s disaster-prone organizations, and act to develop and implement business continuity plans.
A formal business continuity team must be set up to evaluate the kinds of risks, internal and external, that could affect the organization’s business. The risks should not be confined to likely IT disasters, but should cover such possibilities as a major overseas supplier going out of business, top executives of the business dying in an accident and the appearance of new technology that makes the business’s technology obsolete and costly.
Dedicated focus on business continuity as suggested above could bring up actions you could take to minimize disasters. This is likely to be the major benefit of BC planning.
Backup of business-critical IT resources and storing backups in a different location, developing alternative supply sources, technology reviews, and succession planning and executive development could all get increased focus. And the result would be a business that can continue to operate even in the event of a major disaster or disruption.
Planning for something that might never occur might seem ridiculous. Yet that is the reality on the ground. Nobody could have forecast 9/11 that cost Citicorp an estimated $700 million to recover from.
Business Continuity planning involves identifying all the major vulnerabilities of a business, including IT disasters. Enterprise Content Management systems seek to support business continuity through creating independent content repositories, automated backup of the content, and other practices.