Understanding BCP, DRP, and COOP ◾ 275
© 2011 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
and therefore not working, there should be a clear statement of policy regarding
pay, leave, and benets cover for the duration.
While often overlooked, the human resource part of business recovery is a vital
link between the employees who produce the recovery and the plan that guides it.
However, very little in the development of a business recovery plan can be ignored
by human resources. Careful consideration of the issues will allow those planning a
business recovery to protect and support its most critical resource—its employees.
Identifying the Strategy and Scope
Dening the strategy and scope for business continuity and disaster recovery will
be informed by the culture of the organization and its risk appetite. e level of risk
appetite is not static and will change according to the economic climate and the
number and magnitude of publicly published incidents. For example, no one would
have considered the prospect of two planes ying into the World Trade Center
before they did. However, as a consequence of that event, many executives raised
the “what if” questions. No one would have considered the consequences of ood-
ing before hurricane Katrina or the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or even
the oods in Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom, which killed few people yet
almost took down GCHQ, a government central intelligence site. And who would
have expected the 100-year storm to present itself for two consecutive years?
Pandemics such as the plague do not seem possible in the industrialized world where
medical advances and health services cure impossible diseases. And yet SARS and Avian
Flu threatened to spread across the globe as passengers ew from country to country.
e UK government currently cites Pandemic u as the top risk on the National Risk
register. In the United Kingdom, Blue Tongue and Mad Cow disease caused the estab-
lishment of no-go zones restricting travel in various parts of the country.
Industrial action, strikes, and working to rule among labor forces seem to con-
ne themselves to the history books and yet the threat of action does not.
We will consider each of these triggers and more later in the chapter. ey are
introduced here, however, to demonstrate the wide range of issues that can impact
an organization’s risk appetite and its propensity to increase and decrease its view of
the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery preparedness drawing
on funds from a limited budget.
However, the process for the development of the strategy and policy remains
the same, whatever the extent of the appetite.
Project Planning
e term “project planning” for business continuity is anathema. A project implies
a specic start and end date, a budget, and a set objective. However, the concept of
BC and DR is that it is a continuous process, rarely is there a budget set, and further,
how can we measure the quality of our plans until the worst happens? However, we