A natural disaster or other serious business-disrupting event is not a question of “if,” but rather “when,” for most businesses. All businesses must periodically assess and improve the maturity of their BCM (Business Continuity Management) programs to ensure that current and future operational needs are addressed.

According to experts, about 42 million people were forced to flee their homes and businesses because of natural disasters around the world in 2010, more than double the number during the previous year.  42 million people is roughly the size of Argentina’s entire population.  The onslaught of natural disasters in 2011 also has been grim.  The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan left more than 10,000 people dead, some 17,500 missing and about a half-million homeless.

It is said more than 90% of the disaster displacements in 2010 were caused by weather-related hazards such as floods and storms.  “The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is increasing, and this trend is only set to continue.” said Elisabeth Rasmusson, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.  In the United States, tornadoes have wreaked havoc from Alabama to Massachusetts, while floods have inundated states from Montana to Louisiana. In May 2011 the southwest Missouri city of Joplin was hit with the U.S.’s deadliest tornado in six decades. It killed at least 141 people and destroyed more than 8,000 homes in a city of about 50,000 people.  The EF 5 tornado that destroyed much of Joplin also destroyed medical records from St. John’s Regional Medical Center.  Pieces of medical records and even x-rays were found up to 75 miles outside of Joplin.

There are non-nature related scenarios that businesses should be prepared for as well.  Examples include, fire, malicious employees, theft, human error, hardware failure, software failure, computer virus and malware.  The odds of any one of these disasters impacting a business is high.  Being prepared could mean the difference between your business surviving or not.

Business Continuity Management is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. The two high level parameters to consider during BCM planning are the recovery time objectives (RTO) — i.e., the desired time to recover applications and recovery point objectives (RPO) — i.e., the acceptable transaction loss.

At Paruzia Technologies our mission is to partner with businesses to enable them to gain efficiencies and improve their capabilities. That means that being a part of a BCM strategy for our customers is core to our business. Our services are designed to be fault tolerant both locally at the place of business and at the data center(s) that hosts customer data. What that really means is that when disaster strikes our clients are covered and business keeps going. Can your current IT solution do that for you?