Having employees work remotely in the event of a bird flu outbreak might not be so easy.
Many industry sectors are building strategies around protecting their companies and organizations from a potential bird flu pandemic. Most of these plans focus on having employees work remotely, a basic self-quarantine that keeps them out of the office and away from possible infection but allows the business to keep functioning.
These strategies, though, overlook an important fact: We are only as strong as the shared infrastructure and home continuity plans that support our remote users.
If everyone adopts the same approach to deal with a possible pandemic, we must insert the public infrastructure into our business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans; i.e., people must have running water, food and shelter in order to stay at home for a certain amount of time.
In addition, employees must have electricity to power PCs, phones and lights, and a means of remote communication through the likes of DSL, cable and phone lines. They will also need predefined ways to communicate outside of corporate email in case it's not available.
As you can see, the business risk starts to increase because most of these services are outside of a company's control.
For businesses like grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations, the remote-user model isn't even an option—a situation that can really cause a dilemma when trying to avoid contact with
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Michael S. Mimoso, Editorial Director
others.
In those cases, an employer will need to make decisions on health versus the need to remain open for business due to greater demand caused by the pandemic. Other issues, such as the legal responsibility around effective protection for employees, health care benefit claims, hours of capable operations and forced government shutdowns, can make BCP development a challenge, to say the least.
Each of us will need to have disaster recovery plans for our homes and communities. Children may not be able to go to school. If multiple members of the family have jobs, what will happen if they all need access to the same broadband connection to continue to work? Who is going to volunteer to get the groceries, gas and water?
What we end up with is a long chain of dependencies for everything to operate smoothly. Some of these items are in our control, others are not. That is why risk analysis is an important tool for us to use in communicating these issues to our business leaders.
To ensure effectiveness, adopt a scenario-based risk analysis that takes into account a range of possibilities, such as lack of water and electricity. Also, never forget to include security controls such as personal firewalls in your plan for distributing the workload to remote users.
Finally, I challenge each of you to understand the BCPs of your local community, utilities and other suppliers of the shared infrastructure. Find out what service guarantees they are legally required to provide. You might be surprised at how quickly the list of assumptions—from grocery stores being open to broadband service continuing—in your risk analysis will grow.
This was first published in November 2006