Business Continuity Virtual Workspace

Most companies now have business continuity plans in place and there are some great tools and third party sites that help manage the process of developing those plans by providing a central, secure repository as a hosted service.  There are some scenarios where that architecture is not entirely suitable either for preparing or exercising plans.

1. Where a business continuity team is distributed, working from multiple locations, they are often working offline.  The central repository model doesn’t work well where team members must work whilst disconnected.

2. If internet access is unavailable to some team members during an exercise or when a plan is invoked, many companies rely on either stored local copies of documents or hard copies.  There is no guarantee that these documents and other required information will be fresh. 

3. Where you already have documents and processes in place, deploying a new hosted solution that is template driven could force you to use their forms. That means a lot of re-work must be redone to accommodate the vendor’s designs.

There is an alternative and complementary architecture that sidesteps these issues. It can also be used alongside central repositories. 

Using standard, Microsoft technology - Microsoft Office Groove 2007 - any file on laptops or PC’s can be kept synchronised between machines used by other team members.  Work can continue whilst offline. Any changes made to files whilst offline or offline are automatically sent to other team members when they next connect, without email attachments.  The platform is widely used by emergency response teams in the US (e.g. Strong Angel III and in Florida during hurricanes) and in the Middle East by the US military and relief organisations.   Any concerns over security of distributed documents on laptops in the field are dispelled by the software’s rigorous, enforced security model.