Preparing for a pandemic is an essential part of any company’s Business Continuity Program.  The experts agree that a pandemic is coming, and most business continuity plans (unless you have an advanced plan) do not address the unavailability of people – usually a BC plan involves the movement of people from one location to another location.

First, you need to develop a list of planning assumptions.  Most experts will tell you to plan for 30-40% absenteeism during the height of the pandemic.  They also say there is likely to be 3 waves of a pandemic.  These should become part of your assumptions.

Second, you should develop a list of activites you will undertake leading up to a pandemic (actions to take right now) and activities to perform when the pandemic comes.  There are guides that will assist you in planning at the following locations:

PandemicPrep.Org Resource Guide

PandemicFlu.Gov Planning Guide

Missouri DHSS Ready in 3 Planning Guides

Next, once you’ve developed a plan, it is important that you communicate the plan to your employees, so that they know what to expect from your company during a pandemic.  You should also be prepared to communicate to all stakeholders about your plans.  This would include customers, vendors, shareholders, board members, and employees.

Also, your employees should be educated so that they can begin to prepare their families at home for a pandemic.  They should consider now what would happen if the schools and day cares would close, have they begun to gather two weeks food (p.7 of PandemicFlu.Gov/Planning Guide) and 3 days of water supplies – the link above recommends two weeks for both food and water, but storing two weeks of water at 1 gallon of water per person per day is unrealistic - that would be 64 gallons of water for a family of 4).

Obviously, We can’t cover everything you should do during a pandemic, but I hope I’ve given you some guidance and identified some helpful resources that you can review to begin preparing.  The main thing is to start preparing if you haven’t done so already.

If you are researching how to plan, but you don’t want to build the plan yourself, feel free to e-mail me at hdolgin@dolginconsulting.com or visit our website at Dolgin Consulting to see what it would cost to have us build your plan for you.

Thanks.

Harlan Dolgin, CBCP
Independent Consultant
Dolgin Consulting

Your company has a data center or two, or maybe even more than that, and you are wondering what is the best way to test the data center to make sure you can recover all aspects of it under any circumstances.  How far should you go and what kind of committment is required?

There are a number of answers, and each answer has a different level of committment in terms of resources, both people and financial.

If you have an outsourced 3rd party recovery contract, or fully resilient data centers, then you should be performing at least annual exercises to make sure you can recover to your backup location as quickly as possible.  Both speed and accuracy must be recorded and testedg during the exercise, to reduce the surprises that may crop up if you have to recover in anger during a real event.

However, your work shouldn’t end there.  Your primary data center may be vulnerable to multiple risks that are not addressed by a simple recovery to your alternate location.  For example, if you have diverse power feeds, have you ever turned off one of those feeds to ensure that a single feed can power the entire data center?  This is an invaluable experience where you can learn a lot about the power infrastructure of your data center.  It will uncover any eroneous wiring where both power feeds may not be wired correctly to all cabinets in your data center.  You’d much rather find this out during a maintenance window under your control, rather than during the working day when it can cause a lot more damage.  Once you’ve done this with one of the power feeds, it is a good idea to do it to the other power feed.

A further extension of this is to take both feeds down at the same time, to simulate a full power down of both feeds.  This must be planned very carefully, but the advantage is that all systems within the data center will come down – they can be shut down gracefully or they can be allowed to come down hard, again to simulate a harsh power outage.  This would only be done if you have docemented processes that can be followed to recover your systems and you are confident those processes will be successful. 

These methods are an ideal way to test and validate your documented processes, perform tests that are much more indepth than just recovery to your alternate site, and gain a much better understanding of your data center assets.  If you plan the type of exercises I’ve mentioned here, you should start planning sessions 3-4 months in advance of the exercise date.  There are a lot of decisions to be made in order to do this correctly.

Thanks.

Harlan Dolgin, CBCP
Dolgin Consulting
314.304.4354
hdolgin@dolginconsulting.com

Today we learned about new H5N1 outbreaks in China with birds – two farms in the Jiangsu province – and in Egypt - where a 16 year old girl died from Bird Flu.  It seems like it was last December where we also had a series of new outbreaks that were both zoonotic and human.  There will no doubt be more of them in the coming weeks and months.

What experts are looking for are the building blocks of the Bird Flu that make it more likely than it was last year to be able to transmit easily from one person to another.  Without evidence of this, we can only wait and prepare, as we should all be doing, for what we know is coming.

Experts say a pandemic of some form will come and in fact is overdue.  Therefore it is prudent that we prepare for it, since it is a certainty.  Granted, we don’t know how deadly it will be, or when it will be here, but since it is a 100% certainty to be on its way, then we best be prepared.

Next blog, I’ll discuss some ways we can be prepared for a pandemic, bird flu or otherwise.