Business Adversity And Disaster Recovery Planning
The best laid schemes of mice and men is a phrase originating from a Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’ written in1786. The poem is an apology from the author to the mouse for accidentally upturning the mouses’ nest while ploughing a field. And the phrase itself is colloquially used to describe that even the most careful planning can be undone by unexpected circumstances or events.
Most Information Technology professionals today would be familiar with this phrase or a similar variation. Why? Because Information Technology projects can be large and complex making them susceptible to unexpected problems. It has certainly been my experience that most large projects and organizations factor for the ‘best laid schemes of mice and men’ variable in their change management and risk management practices.
But even the security offered by change management, risk management, backups and redundancy is not enough these days for many organizations that stake their survival on online services or transactions. This is primarily because backups and redundancy are usually designed to cater for a single component failure. For example, if a network link drops then a secondary link takes over. But what happens if multiple components fail at once due to a natural disaster, sabotage, security incident, health related outbreak or core services failure?
The result from such a catastrophic failure can be devastating to a business, especially if there has been no planning on how to restore what took years to build up in just a few short hours or days.
