Technology and digital experiences have become not only enablers but differentiators for every modern-day business. Complexities of business are translated into software code, data, integrations, and processes that make daily life better and simpler. With the rapid technological advancements, consumers are expecting better value with every interaction, always.
While we are happily enjoying the modern digital age every day, this extensive dependency on technology also exposes businesses to outages and failures. They have the capability to bring life to a standstill or worse. Recent outages due to CloudStrike’s upgrade and a ransomware attack at ChangeHealth are just a couple of examples where adverse impacts were felt by the masses for prolonged periods. Such breakdowns cause loss of business, repute, and revenue. And may adversely impact community and individuals if the critical time-sensitive needs are not met.
Organizations often ignore, neglect business continuity planning, or are over-confident that this will never happen to them. Every organization, irrespective of its size and nature of business, needs to carry out business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
Over my career journey, I have dealt with my share of outages and their impacts. Below are some learnings and recommendations from my experiences. I hope these provoke your thought process, planning, and actions. Some day, this proactive effort will help prevent continuity issues in your own space.
- You can get going with a simple planning framework. Pull together the best group of stakeholders from your business functions. Review your most critical services. Conduct an impact assessment if an outage happens due to people, technology, or operational reasons. Come up with mitigation and recovery steps that could be deployed with desired results. Ownership must be clearly called out, accepted, and practiced. Capture the plan. Circulate for awareness.
- Since internal and external parameters are always evolving, ensure to regularly revisit for tune-ups and true-ups.
- Scout for good industry practices and incorporate them into your tech and operations.
- Over time, build on it. Think holistically and cover end-to-end aspects that are needed for the use of your services by the end user. There will be areas that you control, and the areas that you can influence. Interdependencies will surface parts that may be out of your influence (e.g. acts of God, power outages, internet slowness, public cloud performance). Be pragmatic and detail-oriented so that the least time is wasted deciphering information or filling gaps in the hour of need.
- For a new initiative, you may be able to design from the get-go for resilience and plan for addressing adverse events.
- In case an adverse event still happens, learn from it, and incorporate fixes in your processes/technology or add remediation steps in your recovery plan for handling similar situations in the future.
- Some organizations don’t even wait for an adverse event to check the preparedness from their planning. ‘Chaos monkey’ testing is a way to create random issues in a simulated setup to discover gaps and improvement needs.
- Don’t rely on gut feeling alone for judging the preparedness. Use empirical information. For example, ‘time to recovery’ during recent incidents can be an indicator of how the organization is fairing in this area. It will be great for executive leaders to regularly check when the plan was last updated and what is the health of the plan.
Please don’t wait. Get started today. I hope this information helps you in coming up with your plan. Please reach out if you want to discuss your specific situation or any other business technology challenges keeping you awake.
About the Author
Manu Goyal is a customer-centric, entrepreneurial business leader with a proven track record in defining strategy, building organizations, and leading teams to success. With extensive experience at top-tier companies like UHG/Optum, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, and Visa, NationsBenefits, Manu has driven innovation across SaaS, payments, healthcare, financial services, digital commerce, analytics, and AI/ML.
He excels in engineering high-quality, mission-critical software products and spearheading transformative initiatives. Passionate about driving business growth, Manu enjoys leading, advising, and consulting on strategy, product innovation, technology, and change management.
