Seven Tips To Evaluate A WAR Site

Most organisations have implemented a Business Continuity Management (BCM) initiative at some point of time. One of the biggest decisions they have had to make in this initiative is investing in a Work Area Recovery (WAR) site. This is an integral part of BCM for organisations in the BFSI, IT, ITES, and other sectors that employ processes on massive scales.

Disaster Recovery (DR) focuses on recovery/resilience of ‘Data’ and ‘Equipment’ whereas BCM is inclusive and a superset of DR. As a result, even if organisations have IT DR in place, they may not have resilience at business level!

The two additional pillars ensuring a successful BCM strategy are ‘People’ and ‘Processes’. For both, one may need a formal site known as the Alternate Work Area and the strategy of keeping such recovery sites in ‘perpetual readiness’ is called WAR preparedness.

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Usually, the business side determines the resources it would like to depute to keep Critical Business Functions (CBFs) running and available at a minimum acceptable level. The SLAs with the customers determine the Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD) for each of these CBFs and hence one has to achieve Recovery of a disrupted CBF within the MTPD, thus defining a very important success parameter called as Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

According to Gartner 2010 Risk and Security Survey results, Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are shrinking. 63% of survey respondents said that their RTOs for mission-critical business processes are less than 24 hours. With such short RTOs, it is imperative that BCM plans are current and easily available during a crisis.

The WAR site, where CBFs will be resumed, forms the backbone of BCM strategy and merits scrupulous method of selection. To ensure that there’s no deviation from accepted RTOs, the BCM site has to be selected with utmost care, as success would be defined by both- the availability and the accessibility to this site.

Here are seven practical tips to clinically evaluate a proposed site:

1. Site should be far enough so as not to be impacted by the same incident yet near enough so that the staff resuming CBFs does not find difficulties reaching there within the given Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The Site should be no closer than 10 Km/6 Miles and no further than 25 Km/15 Miles. This ensures that under subnormal traffic conditions, the teams can reach the site within 1 to 2 Hours. Such site is also called a NEAR BCP Site.

2. Evaluate whether the site has a fallback to a FAR BCP Site in a different seismic zone – no closer than 500 Km/300 Miles and no further than 1200 Km/750 Miles. BCM WAR site vendors can provide such an arrangement.

3. Ensure that there is no ‘single point of failure’ such as single bridge crossing a river/creek or a single highway which takes you to the site. Site must have multiple access routes.

4. Site should have power drawn from separate grids. If not, it must use redundant DG sets with permissible fuel storage that can sustain in case of a lock-in.

5. Site should not be in the vicinity of city garbage dumps, fuel depots, chemical plants, and food processing units.

6. Site near major railway stations, bus depots, shopping malls, event stadiums should be avoided, though transportation would be convenient. Such site would be in the proximity of ‘soft targets for terror’.

7. A WAR site should never be conspicuous hence should not be provided for in well-known business parks. No signage, no bold declaration of where it is because internal and external threats can target it. There’s a growing trend to provide WAR arrangement in nondescript building structures where the exteriors don’t give away anything but the interiors meet every requirement of BCM.

The above list is indicative only and drawn as a collection from best practices followed by BCM professionals from BFSI, ITES, and other sectors. They represent a school of thought and one may choose different criteria of selection. The final success depends on the acceptability of the site by the staff that would be displaced there during a Continuity of Business (COB) invocation. Their familiarity with the site and periodic drills, which involve planned or surprise invocations with the desired staff moving to this site, will determine success.

The future may look at an increase of specialist vendors who provide professionally managed WAR sites, where all the above criteria are provided for. Such sites are kept in perpetual state of readiness and provide recovery seats agreed upon. As the market expands, such WAR site providers will certainly achieve economies of scale and experience and offer their services at highly competitive rates, making WAR Site selection a mere comparative exercise!

The author is an AVP and a Practice Head for Omnitech’s Business Continuity Services division.