Quite a number of companies that I speak to, at least those not regulated by the FCA, tell me that their Business Continuity Plan is to send everyone home and get them to work from home if there is a disaster.

For all companies these days, even regulated ones, a significant proportion of their staff can quite happily work from home. However, a core of the business still needs to work closely (physically) together. This is most often the Crisis Management team and core business functions and generally, depending on industry, works out to be around 10% of staff.

Improvements in buildings and infrastructure mean that the likelihood of the more traditional risks, fires and floods, have waned. However, new risks have taken their place, such as cyber-attack and in cities particularly, long term police cordon.

The failing in the “send everyone home” solution is twofold.

Firstly, most often staff will leave their laptops in the office overnight and during lunchbreaks or offsite meetings. Companies are really struggling with ensuring that staff take laptops offsite with them.

The result is that if they are required to work from home they will have to rely on their own technology or the company will need to buy, image and configure sufficient infrastructure at the time of disaster to support their remote workforce. This is difficult to test prior to the event.

The most significant failing in the “send everyone home” solution is in the increasingly likely event that their organisation is hit by ransomware, or other malware that locks down their infrastructure. In this event, they will have all the PCs that they need but will be unable to use them. This is even whether they take them home or not.

So, the simple and remarkably cost-effective answer is to subscribe to a Work Area Recovery Service which provides access to replacement PCs and Office within an hour of a disaster. This should cost approximately 0.3% of the cost of providing your main office.

It will also provide technical support to ensure the core team is up and working quickly, while your in-house IT team are busy recovering your home infrastructure. They cannot be in two places at the same time after all.

I appreciate that “send them home” seems like a cost effective solution, but it really does not meet the effective, repeatable and testable criteria most auditors would want a plan to meet.

At Fortress, we believe that a strong work area recovery plan is essential to the continuity of any business.

Contact us today to book a tour of our facilities or download the Work Area Recovery Market Review to learn more.