Maintain Continuity in a Power Outage

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If you have a DRP and BCP, it may be large, complex, and difficult to identify specific risks, dependencies, incident-specific plans, and recovery workflows.
The DRP and BCP is not regularly updated and specific scenarios are not tested.
You and your team are not prepared and chaos ensues when there is a power outage.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Time – It seems impossible to make the time to properly prepare for these incidents when the resources required are busy with their "day jobs."
Effort – Along the same lines as the time constraint, the effort and resources required to thoughtfully prepare BIAs with risks and dependencies and conduct comprehensive tabletop planning may feel like it doesn't pay dividends.
Investment – There are implicit and explicit costs associated with planning and testing. Testing will need to be done after hours in a maintenance window and should be done two to four times annually; overtime pay alone is a quantifiable cost.

Impact and Result

Every organization should have comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans, but those in areas prone to power outages should extract the power outage scenario from the comprehensive DRP and BCP.
Organizations must spend time on scenario-specific business impact analysis, tabletop planning, recovery workflows, and actually testing to ensure there are no gaps in plans.
It is much more practical to focus on this single likely scenario than to revisit and test against the full DRP or BCP semi-annually.

Maintain Continuity in a Power Outage Research & Tools

1. Maintain Continuity in a Power Outage Deck – A guide to help you focus on honing the organization’s ability to respond to, and maintain continuity during, a power outage.

Don’t get overwhelmed by trying to boil the ocean with comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans when there is a materially higher risk of a specific incident – a power outage. Focus on honing the organization’s ability to respond to, and maintain continuity during, a power outage.

Organizations must spend time on scenario-specific business impact analysis, tabletop planning, recovery workflows, and actually testing to ensure there are no gaps in plans.

2. BCP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Conduct a BIA to determine acceptable RTOs and RPOs.

Define an objective impact scoring scale, estimate the impact of downtime, and set recovery targets.

3. BCP Tabletop Planning Template – Document the recovery workflow and projects to close gaps.

Build a workflow of the current steps for business recovery. Identify gaps and risks to recovery. Brainstorm and prioritize solutions to address gaps and mitigate risks.

4. BCP Recovery Workflow Example – Use this example to assist in the creation of your BCP.

Use this example BCP recovery workflow to support your own planning efforts.

Maintain Continuity in a Power Outage visualization

Avoid chaos when the lights go out.

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