When disaster strikes... A guideline to business continuity awareness

”When there is a crisis, the crisis has to be managed”, was once said by Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor. In actual disaster situations it is not as easy to handle the crisis and just “manage” it, you better be prepared.
When disaster strikes… these incidents cannot usually be handled with the organizational structures and resources provided for “normal everyday business” and therefore require a business continuity plan.
As we have experienced an increasing number of disaster events over the recent years, big and dramatic events like – the World Trade Center terrorist attack of 9/11, the Madrid and London train bombings, earthquakes in Pakistan, hurricanes in North America or the Southeast Asia tsunami, which were highly recognized in the media all over the world. But at the same time there have been also large number of disasters at a less recognized level, like fires, flooding, building crush down, and so forth. All these events have one thing in common: They can put a company out of business. To prevent that we are not prepared to respond these disaster events, we need to have a plan!
But planning for an event can only be the first step, next we need to implement these plans in our organization and make communicate it, to ensure that every employee knows what to do and how to react in a disaster event. Many organizations fail to actually implement a BCP program because of the perception that it is a process that is too costly, time-consuming, and requires a large amount of resources. Therefore the management must be assured that by investing in BCP, the organization’s life gets protected and that it makes good business sense.