A hot topic recently is business continuance.  For businesses today, it’s more than recovering from a Disaster or failed systems. Businesses want and need to be operating seamlessly when issues strike. It’s about Business Continuance. Keeping the operations running. Continuing operations in spite of challenges that your business may face. These challenges can be anything from cloud outages ( AWS outage…), weather related or even an act of God like the Papal visit this week in Washington DC, NYC and Philadelphia. Organizations in these cities have been planning for this visit to ensure business operate as normal.

Developing Business Continuance plans takes time and many different departments must come together to develop the plan. It’s not a  one person job. It takes teams to ensure it is successful. From the IT perspective, it is beyond making sure the servers are running but also making sure users can still connect and will this have a $$ cost added to any existing infrastructure. Will the current environment and/or hardware be sufficient or does the BC plan require additional licensing and software?

As you may be aware, in my current position I work in Center City Philadelphia. The Papal visit has had us make some adjustments and prepare accordingly. Many things had to be planned because access to center city buildings were being closed Thursday & Friday. Roads and bridges into the city are limited or  even closed , which will last until Monday at noon. This means thousands of workers in the city of Philadelphia are not able to go into work as normal on 2 business working days. No work means loss of productivity and loss of $$$. As part of BC planning to ensure we operated as normal as much as possible, IT had to do some planning. Items that had to be factored included but not limited to :

• What and how many additional remote access ( if any)
• Licensing for VPN connections or remote desktop
• Any impact to network or bandwidth
• Additional access and security concerns
• Any additional load on collaboration systems such as Skype/ Video conferencing due to remote access?

This wasn’t an easy task and took lots of planning from many people beyond IT, that spanned over the course the year. Many people have expressed to me how interesting this was and wanted to know more about what we did and how others planned for this sort of event. So… to answer some questions and gain insight into business continuance,  Why not have Current Status do an episode on this topic!? I think I can arrange that ….

Join us September 24th, 2015 @10:15pm EST  for Episode 27 of Current Status . We are joined by Jay Gagné, CTO Of Razor Technology (@jaytgagne)  to chat about the challenges businesses face with developing business continuance plans and what they can do to overcome them to maintain continuing operations. We will talk about how companies like the one I work for prepared for Pope’s visit and Jay’s insights on how other businesses can prepare for similar events.