Business Leaders in particular should be (and are becoming) highly motivated by the subject of Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery. It is reported that in 2008 direct executive level interest in BCP and DR was 33%, in 2009 that figure had increased to 67%. Why?

Well, I believe it is a combination of factors. Clearly business has become highly dependent upon the digital medium to communicate, do business, create and store data, in so doing they have also become incredibly vulnerable to the three C’s; code, cables and catastrophe – and not just catastrophe’s of the IT kind but those related to nature and the environment, loss of utilities, equipment failure, breaches of security, as well as fire, increased competition and the biggest one of them all, the intervention of people.

The other factor motivating business leaders is the pressure they are under to deliver results to the businesses stakeholders. This see’s the IT guy under just as much pressure as the Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Production Manager and the Supply Chain Manager. One of the main KPI’s for many of todays CIO’s and IT Managers is 99.9% uptime – keep the systems up and running so the business can function and deliver the results. Interestingly it is reported that 50% of all businesses do not have a Business Continuity Plan in place drive the uptime KPI. Of those that do have a BC plan, 93% can expect to execute the disaster recovery component of their plan at some point in time. That means there are 50% of businesses out there potentially exposed to the risk of serious disruption to the continuity of their business or worse still, a major disaster.  It is estimated that 20% of all companies will suffer a fire, theft, power, flood, storm or a major IT disaster. Of those that do, 43% will never re-open. If a business is able to get up and running again, 80% of them will fail within 13 months. Expect the vulverability of businesses to BC issues and DR to become a major issue for insurance companies (for example) - they don’t want organisations going out of business, there’s no money in that for them, so expect BCP and DR regulation and compliance to become a requirement  issue for businesses in the future.

So what is the potential cost to a business of a major disruption? A simple rule of thumb is to take a businesses annual turnover and divide it by the total number of hours the business operates on an annual basis. For example a business with an annual turnover of $10M, open 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks per year will have a downtime cost of $5000 per hour. In 2003 Carter Holt Harvey’s New Zealand pulp mill in Kinleith experienced 88 days of industrial action which cost the company $NZ39m. The group’s CEO, Peter Springford, said that the company’s pulp and paper division had an $A85m slump in sales revenue as a result of the impact of the strike. What was the downtime cost per hour? $18,466.

OK, so not every business is like Carter Holt Harvey, but think about it. The average business might be able to handle an outage of some sort for two or three hours without any serious impact on the business. What about a day? or two days? What is the cost of sales and services lost to the competition, deadlines not met, wages paid to unproductive workers? etc

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery; take it seriously http://www.datasouth.co.nz/understand/seminar-seven.html

We were never meant to discover coal and crude oil. Fossil fuels should have remained the hidden reservoirs of C02, created over hundreds of millions of years, which has allowed life as we know it today to have developed.

It is said oil was created from plankton that lived over 150 million years ago in what is, or was then, the planets oceans. When the plankton died they were compressed together under many layers of sand and mud that then became rock and the combination of intense pressure and heat turned the plankton into oil and gas. Coal on the other hand is created from the remains of plant and animal life that existed over a 100 million years ago during the time the planet was inhabited by the dinosaurs. Like the plankton, when the plant and animal life died it was absorbed into the swamp land that existed at the time and compressed, over time, under immense pressure, causing the oxygen and hydrogen to escape and leaving a heavily carbon based material that evolved into coal. We were not meant to find it.

There is no denying that without coal and oil many of mans most significant achievements, and the progression of the human race as a whole, simply would not have occurred. However, many things in life that are perceived as ‘good’ or or beneficial can often come at a cost – there are always trade-offs. Some think of it as yin and yang, others karma.

The human race could not have existed, in its present form, alongside the dinosaurs in the oxygen rich environment which prevailed at that time. It needed the planet to change, as it reportedly did with the event that is said to have extinguished the dinosaurs. What has evolved out of that is a balanced environment conducive to life as we now it today but which is being sabotaged as a result of excessive burning of fossil fuels that release carbon into the earths atmosphere. As the scientific research behind global warming has shown, the levels of carbon being released have compounded to a flash point, which if not corrected, could have profound effects upon life and the human race in a way which we can not really imagine.

OK then smart-arse, what the solution? All leading nations must commit to reducing green house gas emissions in line with UN recommendations. INVEST in research and development of sustainable energy resources as an alternative to fossil fuels. Work toward the development of a global energy network where energy is a shared resource. Boys! Put the C02 down!