Back In Time For Business Continuity
Business Continuity is that part of Disaster Recovery ensuring that at least some part of a business keeps running following a computer outage. Regardless of the cause being from a hack, natural disaster (such as a fire) or accidental there needs to be a plan to get over it. Hopefully the Disaster Recovery Plan will include elements of restoring backups, replacing or upgrading hardware and software. There will be some time before any replacement system is up and running properly; it is then that Business Continuity comes into play.
Kindus has discussed how poor planning can make an outage particularly disruptive. The British Airways system failure in 2017 could have been better handled; the company has been affected by other major outages in 2019 and 2022 further affecting their reputation for Business Continuity.
A BBC report from September 2024 highlights cases where pen and paper or replacement stand-alone machinery has been used to overcome an initial loss of computer services. Following the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 some airlines used printed passenger lists and wrote out boarding passes by hand. Other examples of pen and paper solutions include UK GP practices in 2023 printing off patient lists, making patient notes and writing prescriptions by hand because they could not rely on their software systems. In 2024 Dallas based Omni Hotels responded to a ransomware attack by using paper based reservations and walking guests to their rooms as the key allocation system was not available. A House of Lords report on Ransomware and UK national security from 2023 states that some victims of Ransomware were forced to resort to pen and paper solutions. Other, slightly less dated, technology solutions can still be used for Business Continuity. The BBC report cites uses of fax machines to send orders and WhatsApp or Signal messaging groups for corporate communications.
In a few cases paper based records are still the recommended storage medium. Keys or recovery phrases for crypto wallets need to be secure and retrievable. Some sources suggest that this information be stored by engraving onto metal ensuring security and durability. In the majority of cases paper records are only a short term solution. As the quantity of records scale up so does their physical volume and the potential work of transferring it all back onto computer approaches those of the 12 labours of Heracles.
Any continuity plan that relies on alternate technology needs to be backed up by having that technology in place and ready to go. Having some sort of form in quantity and on-site or as a file that can be printed from stand-alone devices will be somewhat better than having staff write down what they deem relevant. Technology such as Amazon Textract aims to pull handwritten information from scanned documents. These solutions are likely to improve with AI advances but having a consistent format, such as standardized forms, to the data scanned in will help with the underlying machine learning model.
Whatever technology has been chosen as a last resort in the case of failure staff need to be familiar with how it is going to be used. As with a backup strategy there must be practice restore sessions to ensure that the backups will work out if or when they are needed. The use of alternative technologies needs to be part of staff training and documented as part of the Business Continuity Plan.
