Disasters Can be “Business as Usual” with Enough Planning, Expert Says

Don’t bother toying with a term like disaster recovery, says Intel’s business continuity manager Kathryn Dornfeld. Instead, companies should consider ongoing business continuity planning to make DR more like business as usual.

In an article on the ComputerWorld website, Briony Smith says Dornfeld made the remarks at last week’s World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto. In a presentation, Dornfeld “laid out the company’s dizzyingly evolved ecosystem of disaster-planning teams, including emergency response teams, emergency operations centers, issue-prevention management teams and crisis-management teams,” Smith says.

According to Dornfeld, Intel’s corporate emergency operations center meets virtually and is embedded within the company structure. The site emergency operations centers are responsible for managing their own operations and on-site issues during crises and during planning for emergencies.

Focusing on business impacts rather than threats is the best route, she added. “Talk to senior management about critical business functions so that you can do your risk and impact assessment. Focus on the things they’ll relate to, like cost and operational downtime. You need to support them, not tell them what to do.”

She also added that keeping the risk impact assessment fresh and reflective of social, economic and other disasters is important.