As a rule, we recommend that business continuity professionals focus on impacts rather than causes when dealing with disasters; however, there is some benefit to thinking about the different causes of outage or crisis events to ensure all the proper planning, remediation and preparation are in place.
In today’s post, we’ll look at dealing with disasters and how you can be ready for and cope with the problems that come naturally, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and earthquakes.
Related on MHA Consulting: America’s Red Zones: Where Natural Disasters Cluster and What It Means for You
No one can prevent natural disasters, or at least no one who lacks the powers of a superhero from a Marvel movie.
However, ensuring that the issues and risks associated with such disasters are part of your planning and remediation efforts will allow your company to protect life and safety, minimize damage to property, and efficiently recover the business.
Responding to natural disasters can be divided into two areas: managing the emergency and recovering the business. We’ll talk about both below.
Depending on your organization, emergency management (EM) and business continuity (BC) may be handled by different departments.
As a BC professional, you are not likely to have direct responsibility over the emergency management side. (An exception might be if your organization is very small and everyone wears many hats.)
In terms of emergency management, your role as a BC person at a minimum should be one of contacting the teams that do have authority for EM and making sure they’ve written the necessary plans and put the needed provisions in place.
You might help out by putting the EM people in touch with outside experts such as first responders or local governmental emergency management departments and resources who can help them in achieving optimal readiness.
The picture shifts when it comes to the business continuity side.
As a BC professional, you probably will have direct responsibility for your company’s plans and preparations.
Ideally, you will already have comprehensive BC plans in place for bringing the business back up in the event of a disruption. (If you don’t have such plans, what are you waiting for? Time to get to work!)
If you think you have recovery plans prepared, check and make sure. The stakes are too high to assume.
Make sure the plans are complete and that they address the four types of impact for which every business is at risk: to people, to buildings, to technology, and to critical third parties and vendors.
The sooner you have business recovery plans written and ready to go, the better for your company.
As mentioned above, in creating recovery plans, it’s a best practice to focus on impacts (e.g., loss of a facility) rather than causes (e.g., a tornado). However, there is one aspect of your recovery planning that should address specific causes. This is natural disasters where you typically have prior notice, such as hurricanes or winter storms. Along with business continuity plans, specific plans for actions to take prior to the events should be in place. A good example are hurricane plans. They are not reactionary, but proactive plans.
If you live in an area where such events occur, your planning should lay out the stages and milestones such events typically go through. Examples for a hurricane would include when the storm makes landfall or its number category.
Your plans should then lay out the steps your company should take at each milestone (boarding up the windows, shutting down the facility, etc.). Such advance planning saves you from having to make critical decisions in the heat of the moment, when emotion and lack of time can lead to costly mistakes.
When it comes to emergency management planning, most companies do a good job in terms of meeting people’s immediate safety needs, such as ensuring everyone can evacuate quickly in the event of a fire.
However, EM planners sometimes overlook four areas that have special pertinence when it comes to being ready to dealing with natural disasters. They are:
As discussed above, you should already have recovery plans to protect the business from impacts to your people, facilities, and technology.
Dealing with disasters brings its own unique challenges. When it comes specifically to natural disasters, there are four areas where special attention is merited. They are:
Natural disasters can bring unique challenges when it comes to emergency management and business continuity. As part of being ready and dealing with natural disasters, EM plans should address emergency medical preparations, shelter designation, and sojourn preparations and also look out for employees with special needs. For BC plans, the things to look at are facility readiness, problems that might arise with the designated alternate work location, and how the company will handle the absence of key personnel.
For more information on dealing with natural disasters and other hot topics in business continuity and IT/disaster recovery, please see these recent posts from MHA Consulting and BCMMETRICS: