Tom Peruzzi's thoughts on digital, innovation, IT and operations

It is all time the same. Nobody know why, but the myth of “we must have bcm” is in everyone’s ear within IT department. First enthusiasts start reading what BCM (Business Continuity Management) should look like and immediately the first failure begins:

• BCM is a Business topic
• IT should be invited to join business wide BCM and not vice versa
• BCM is a process driven topic, not infrastructure

So BCM is much more a company wide umbrella and as IT Service Continuity Management in ITIL v2 already claims, the mission of the IT is to support the Business Continuity, not to run, drive it.

What we often see ist that there is often seen a direct link between resilience, high availability and BCM. Yes, at the end, all those kinds of providing a more robust service will likely be part of the mitigation plan of the BCM initiative but keep in mind that BCM for IT is:

• Define business critical processes
• Define technical services supporting those
• Assess and analyse risks assiociated to those services
• Define action plan for those risks (accept, mitigate ,delegate, solve)
• Define operations handbook and declare how desaster process is invoked by ops stuff
• ….

Reading those lines shows that only the mitigation/solve in the risk plan is a real “technology” part.

Definitely it is always a good idea to think about risks and how to mitigate, solve or whatever. BCM is much more a method to drive your thoughts/ideas to the mission critical services, nearly nobody will need a resilient lab 🙂 in terms of a desaster (except you are a research organization). So focus on your value supporting technology and do your best and stop thinking in a tech-way only, it is the business which should be supported, not the nice blinking light in your Rack ^^