A threat less: Time to update the plans

We are used to enlarge the business continuity plans with new threats and risks, based on what's happening. It is normal to update plans with threats and scenarios not covered initially. But this time is just the opposite: updating business continuity plans eliminating a threat, or at least reduce the risk of a threat materializing. I'm talking about the announcement of the final of violence by ETA.

If we analyze the main causes of activation of business continuity plans (no IT), we can say there are three main causes of activation:

• Large snowfall, causing employees can not reach their workplaces.
• Lack of delivery by suppliers, for example, power outages and fires in electrical substations that affected the Retiro area in 2008.
• Consequences of terrorist attacks, dropping bombs as the one in the Bull building in Campo de las naciones in 2005, prompting the evacuation of nearby buildings (Correos, Endesa, Cepsa, etc) or the 2009, which we recall here video.

 

 

From now on, we can begin to evaluate this third threat as a minor probability threat, although unfortunately there will always be groups willing to spread terror on this way. Certainly ETA in Spain was the most important terrorist attack threat.

 

The announcement is very good news we all expected and we want to be able to become final and remove this threat from our business continuity plans. Hopefully not the last threat that we discard.

BlackBerry and Continuity

The BlackBerry incident seems to became the worts incident in the communication service history and, without any doubt, will appear in the introduction of most presentations of business continuity providers. Without services from Monday morning, the incident remembers the  ones occurred in 2003 when a the Vodafone network was unavailable in Spain during a day, affecting to 8 millions of users. From this incident, with millionaire losses for Vodafone, the operator became aware of the importance of having an effective business continuity plan and established the internal mechanism required to make it real.

70 million of  BlackBerry users which have not service shows that perhaps wouldn't such a good idea that the service and the terminal would be provide by the same company. If BB's strategy was in question for some time, now the latest incident will do to the operators questioned whether it makes sense.

From a BC point of view, the analysis of BB crisis could be done in three ways:

• As BB user, residential, self-employed, SOHO and big companies, the service test the contingency mechanism defined to grant the delivery of PIM (Personal Information Mobile) service to the users, most of them with a high criticality for some business.
• As Operator, those which has packed product around the BB service must now response to the users, because they are the service marketer and they have the responsibility. The operator must update their business continuity plan increasing the probability of failure of their provider: BB, and establishing the mechanism and funding required.
• BB as provider, must face a number of challenges to survive in a market in which there are a great competition between mobile devices OS, and with a increasing demand of the two main OS: iOS and Android. Apart from that, the company's shares on the stock are falling as quicly as the reliability feeling, what will be very difficult to recover.

We can only wish luck to the crisis managers of BB for the service to recover soon.

An positive issue to highlight form the BB crisis management is the information publication. Making an online tracking of the incident has been a good idea, although it has been carried out too late, because in some moment it have been lack of information.