You’ve spent months drafting, refining and testing your business continuity plan. I’ll bet it’s awesome, too, with lots of rock-solid disaster recovery steps and amazing documentation for getting back on track after a meltdown of critical systems. However, there’s one element that can sink your beautiful plan before it ever gets a chance to shine. It’s not fire or tsunami or even an asteroid the size of Texas. It’s varying degrees of end user frustration, apathy and general ignorance.
Let’s look at five reasons your company’s employees don’t care about business continuity, and ways to make it work anyway:
1. They have no idea that a plan exists.
Believe it or not, the average employee doesn’t spend a lot of time wondering how the business will survive in the event a giant Godzilla-like creature rises from the nearest body of water. They just assume someone will take care of things and usually make a hand wave about backups and perhaps even mention cloud computing. They don’t understand their roles in getting the business back on its feet — because they haven’t been given roles or training. In InformationWeek’s 2013 State of Storage Survey, less than half of survey respondents (40%) had a disaster recovery and business continuity strategy in place and tested it regularly. Another 40% had a disaster recovery plan in place but rarely tested it, while 20% had no plan. I suppose we could all adopt an optimistic outlook and hope for the best, but it kind of gives you a sick feeling, doesn’t it? If not, it should.