After you had to sort out the Millennium Bug issues, you thought that’s the end of that for about 7,999 years! And you spent all that time and effort in drafting plans for dealing with the Bug, should it strike, and probably most of them were never even opened. What a waste!!

Yes there is. Those business continuity and disaster recovery plans should not be thrown in the bin nor should they be put up on the shelf until the next computer problem looms large. They are valuable documents and should be the basis of a very useful and important insurance policy for your business as a whole and for your vital information in particular. Just remember. Emergencies, disasters and other serious problems that could affect your company do not just happen at the change of the century. They can and do happen at any time as recent events can testify.

None of us needs to be reminded of the Manchester bombing, the postal strikes, the serious road, rail or air accidents or the countless fires and floods which have badly affected businesses up and down the country, some probably well known to us. Any one of those disruptions could have affected businesses so seriously they were no longer able to trade effectively, and most of these disasters were well outside the control of the businesses they affected.

After the recent events, what has been very impressive is the speed at which some of the organisations affected by the attacks managed to get back to virtually normal operations. With a few hours, in some cases, and certainly within days for many companies, they were able to continue business operations in new surroundings with the consequential reassuring flow of cash into the bank. This may all seem a little cold and heartless but perhaps one should consider the alternative – no trading, no cash flow and no money to support the victims families in the future. Maintaining the business has to be considered and planning must be carried out to deal with unpleasant problems like this.

So what should we all be doing? Having spent a lot of time and trouble working out how to deal with the possible consequences of the Millennium Bug, we can build on that work and produce cost effective plans to deal with any emergency which might affect the confidentiality, integrity or availability of the company’s second most precious resource – the business information. They are generally called Business Continuity Plans because that’s what they are designed to do – ensure continued business functionality.

Since you may have already done much of the work to develop these as part of your Year 2000 planning, all you need to do now is ensure they are still relevant, remove any items which were specific to the Year 2000 problem and then maintain them. Maintaining them requires two elements. Firstly they must be kept up to date. They need to reflect the current operating procedures and include the latest information. To do this, perhaps a six-monthly check could be made where someone with the right knowledge just makes sure the contact details are still correct, the business processes have not been modified and so on.

Secondly, they must be tested to prove they are practical and work. There is no point at all having a whole set of plans which, when push comes to shove, are totally impractical and do not achieve the desired result i.e. business continuity. Testing can take a variety of forms from the most comprehensive real-time simulation through to a quick desktop exercise. The degree of testing has to be sufficient to convince the users that the plans do work and are practical. Equally the tests should involve those who are most likely to have to put them into action for real. Then the tests serve as training and familiarisation for the staff as well – remember these plans may have to be implemented when the world has fallen apart, staff will not have time to think about them too much – they need to simply get on and carry them out. Testing should be done as often as necessary and frequently different parts of the plans can be tested at different times so that the whole lot have been tested over the period of, say, a year.

All businesses should have BCPs if they intend to continue trading come what may. The level and complexity of the plans will naturally differ based on the type, size and value of the business. For small one man bands they may be little more than a couple of sides of paper, whilst for the major firms, there is likely to be one person employed full time maintaining the complex set of inter-related plans covering all aspects of the business. Whichever part of the spectrum your business falls into, do not be one of the companies to go out of business through poor preparation for that unlikely event - which does happen!

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