The Risks of Poor Business Planning

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and fires often come at the least expected time. Others, such as hurricanes and tornados, are increasing in severity and destruction. Many reports and studies have found that only about 50% of businesses have comprehensive business continuity plans in place. Disasters can come in many shapes and forms. To those foolish enough not to be prepared, it could mean the death of the business. Organizations must plan for these types of disasters:

• Natural Earthquakes, storms, fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, and tidal waves
• System/technical Outages, malicious code, worms, and hackers
• Supply systems Electrical power problems, equipment outages, utility problems, and water shortages
• Human-made/political Disgruntled employees, riots, vandalism, theft, crime, protesters, and political unrest

Each of these can cause aninterruption in operations. The length of time that services could be interrupted are defined as follows:

• Minor Operations are disrupted for several hours to less than a day.
• Intermediate An event of this stature can cause operations to be disrupted for a day or longer. The organization might need a secondary site to continue operations.
• Major This type of event is a true catastrophe. In this type of disaster, the entire facility would be destroyed. A long-term solution would require building a new facility.