We were all shocked the other day by the news from Paris that Notre Dame was terribly damaged in a fire. Thankfully there were no casualties, and priceless artifacts, architectural wonders and works of art were saved in the course of fighting Monday’s fire.
While Notre Dame starts to be secured and rebuild, this experience provides us a great reminder and good example for the need for business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning.
It was revealed that Notre Dame does not have insurance as it is owned and protected by the French state due to its age and cultural significance (1). While the French state is financially on the hook, countless donors have stepped up to fund the rebuilding efforts. Notre Dame is protected without insurance in the conventional sense, but it shows us that every business needs its version of a financial safety net. Your business needs various insurance policies to protect itself. Are you protected? When was the last time you reviewed your coverage?
Notre Dame’s designs are extremely well documented (2). Extensive drawings, pictures, renderings and 3D scans are available, therefore the restoration will be able to follow a plan. What parts of your business are documented? Is it just the physical designs of your business, or is your whole business documented? Are you working in the cloud, or are you at least maintaining cloud backups? Would you be restoring your business following a plan, or would you be reinventing the wheels of your business?
As for the operation of Notre Dame we have not yet seen much about it, however we can think about operations as it applies to our businesses. How do we service customers during and after a disaster? Is there a plan for communications? Offsite operations? How do we recover?
Preparing for the recovery and continuation of your business is a multidimensional process. The important thing to remember (and to live by) is that business continuity and disaster recovery planning is a living process, something that is developed, tested and revised on a regular basis. It is not something that is written once and left in a drawer or buried deep in a file server.
So how prepared are you and your business? How would you finance the rebuild and recovery? Are you protecting your customers’ interests, or are you opening the door for your competition?
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(Originally published on LinkedIn on April 18, 2019)
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