Content Management: Proactive Content Management

Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, these devastating events (which are only the 27 names of 2005 and 2 of the 14 hurricanes) have sounded a wake-up call to the entire United States, and have also awakened a sobering understanding of how fragile business operations are without careful planning.

Some emergencies (such as hurricanes) are harbingers, while others (such as terrorist activities, explosions, earthquakes, computer viruses or human viruses) are often suddenly attacked.

To prepare for these potential dangers, companies are increasingly investing in business continuity programs (Business Continuity PLANNING,BCP). Ensuring access to critical documents and records (typically stored in an enterprise content management system) is an important part of any BCP.

Definition of BCP

The Business Continuity Association (Business continuity Institute) defines BCP as "the prior planning and preparation necessary to identify the impact of potential losses, develop and implement a viable recovery strategy, and develop recovery plans to ensure that events, accidents, or crises (e/i/ (C) Continuity of Enterprise Services at the time of occurrence and delivery of a complete training, testing and maintenance plan. "In other words, BCP is the process of assessing business risks arising from serious, unplanned events and preparing for ensuring continuity of critical operations at the time of an accident."

Not only does BCP involve hardware, software, and data; in fact, it should contain everything that is critical to keeping the business running continuously. For any industry, BCP can be divided into the following categories:

The workplace, including all physical buildings (office buildings, shops, headquarters, workstations, etc.) that may be damaged during the accident.

Technology, in addition to relevant key applications (such as licensing for any planned redundancy), also includes information that is stored in existing hardware and software (typically recovered by local failover and standard disaster recovery plans).

Personnel to ensure that the people being mobilized can continue their initial business functions.

Market interaction to ensure that companies receive support from each division and third party suppliers during a crisis.

Building a Business continuity plan is a complex behavior. The Business Continuity Association recommends that BCP be divided into 10 elements:

1. Start-up and Management. What do companies need? Who will be responsible for business continuity?

2. Business impact Analysis. What business functions are really critical?

3. Risk assessment and control. What events have an impact on the business and how to mitigate these events?

4. Development of business continuity strategy. What is a business continuity solution? How do I deliver a business continuity solution? How does a business continuity solution reduce and prevent business losses?

5. Emergency response and operation. What procedures and groups/centers should be established to deal with emergencies?

6. Development and implementation of BCP. What is needed to better protect the business?

7. Awareness and training. How do you make sure that everyone is aware of their responsibilities and tasks in the event of an emergency?

8. Maintenance and planning exercises. How often are the plans checked and validated?

9. Crisis communication. How can I communicate the BCP plan to both internal and external risk stakeholders?

10. External agent coordination. How to communicate with third party suppliers to ensure continuity of external business supply chain?

The enterprise must initiate, understand, develop, embed, and approve BCP at two levels of the whole and the business group, so as to be well prepared and reduce risk.

Note that BCP differs from the disaster recovery plan. The data center's disaster recovery plan is used for local failover, in effect maintaining redundancy in the IT infrastructure to avoid loss of hardware and infrastructure.