Managing Risks and the world of Web 2.0
Quite some time ago I wrote about Information Management that it is actually all about managing risks. And our little cyclone has reminded me of this fact. We suddenly realised that most information in the company is actually not important (or let me rephrase, not important enough for business continuity)So a lot of what we do in Information Management is more at the 'nice to have' end of the scale of things. But having written this statement does not mean that there are some nice things about IM / Web 2.0 that are now emerging as elements that can add value in the continuity of a business or be of help during recovery from a disaster.
The Web2.0 has brought us wiki's, blogs, ... and this is how they could help:
- Wiki's can lead to more up to date procedural information, but can also help with collecting the learnings from a disaster event. Everybody can contribute! Many people know more than a few isolated auditors
- Blogs can help during the disaster to share news and bring people up to date on the status of services and other things. I noticed for instance that AP, the news agency has started to use pictures from Bloggers in their news coverage. Mobile blogging is also possible, so why not use your phone for things like this?
- The free online storage spaces for content (pictures, movies, but also documents etc) can act as a temporary business continuity site when your own services are down
But having these things playing a more vital role means that these Internet based services become more vital and therefore become part of the DRP/BCP (disaster recovery planning and business continuity planning). That's a way to become important!
So the infrastructure side of things needs a possible rethink as well. Usually data centers are setup as a single point of failure and having the Internet as a vital piece of communication technology does not allow for single points of failure. So setting up the companies infrastructure as a set of networked nodes is a model worth considering as well.
Labels: business continuity, disaster recovery, Risk Management, Web2.0
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 9:08 AM
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