If a business continuity plan isn’t up to date, it can be worse than useless, giving incorrect or misleading information and pushing people toward actions which don’t properly address the current situation. And James Arlen, CISO and CIO for Aiven, recently told attendees at the SecTor conference that these plans being out of date is something that affects the entire industry, as reported by IT World Canada. “We all — whether we want to admit it or not — have business continuity plans that are wildly out of date, wildly incomplete,” Arlen told attendees continues, noting “The business impact assessments were done by people that don’t understand the businesses because you couldn’t get one of the business people interested in having a conversation with you about what happens when their tools die.”
The consequences of this can be critical, as plans fail to consider dependencies between hardware, software, and outside services, leaving potential gaps when a cloud service suddenly becomes unavailable. As for how these plans can be updated, Arlen recommends starting again from scratch, rather than updating the existing plan, according to IT World Canada. Said Arlen to conference attendees about dependency maps, “You have to think deeply about it as you go. Putting together a Cyber Black Start will not take a couple of days or a couple of weeks or even months. It’s a year’s worth of work.”
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