Rethinking BCP/DR in the remote and hybrid era
I was thinking the other day about how every single Business Continutity Plan/Disaster recovery (BCP/DR) document I’ve ever written has some mention about ‘loss of office’ or ‘loss of facility’, and how that particular scenario has evolved over the last couple of years. For many companies, ‘loss of office’ in 2005, is what we refer to as ‘a weekday’ in 2022.
As we all know, we’ve essentially been living through an ongoing BCP event for almost three years. For many more of us than ever before, the ‘office’ is now a part of our living space, or we work in environments where actually working from anywhere is permitted. So how should we be adjusting our BCP/DR strategies? What areas should we focus on for resilience in this new era?
Well, for many companies, BCP/DR plans need to be focused more on keeping their people, rather than specific buildings or locations, up and running. What does that mean?
I think there is a good opportunity here to combine a couple of competing phenomena in the doomscrolling era. 1) Maximizing the advantage that having a geographically diverse remote workforce has, and 2) tackling the so-called ‘great-resignation’, in which a lot of people have apparently decided to simply bugger off into the woods (as is my understanding).
BCP/DR planning as an employee retention strategy?! Let me explain..
Power
All remote employees need a reliable source of power, and to clarify, I am talking about the electrical kind, not the political or mystical branches.
Without power, there can be no Internet. With no Internet, there can be no overly emphasized waves at the end of each and every Zoom call. So let's, at the very least, send our remote employees a basic uninterruptible power supply ($100) to help protect their work IT equipment and provide short-term coverage in the event of power loss or degradation in most living situations.
Yes, you can brand the UPS if you want. Just throw a sticker on it.
There are also plenty of units that can leverage solar power to charge mobile devices — perhaps consider sending these out when onboarding, rather than branded backscratchers.
What about a more severe event? Like an earthquake, or any type of event that takes out power to a wider area for longer. Well, chances are, if this happens, many of us will be focused on things other than jumping on the daily stand-up to talk about a weird error that comes up when you try and compile the app with the latest version of Node, but in the event that you have critical remote employees that you want to try and keep in touch with, the next step up would be a backup generator.
Whole-house generators cost in the range of $10k minimum and often require permitting, definitely need a fuel source, and likely some electrical work to do properly, so it’s unlikely that an employer would drop the cash needed out of pocket to equip an employees house with the ability to generate electricity in an emergency.
That said, there are definitely worse ways to spend your cash as an employer. Perhaps you could pay for a percentage of the installation, or do a sort of payroll-deduction scheme, whereby you pay upfront and recoup the cost over the next 24 months? — Retention! The employee gets to make an actual valued improvement to their house, the employer gets another reason for them to stay with the company for longer, and the DR plan gets a boost!
Connectivity
Ok so once power is sorted out, connectivity is the next hurdle to overcome. For anyone whose ever studied this stuff, the terms ‘hot site’ and ‘cold site’ probably spring to mind. Hot sites have all the connectivity in the world and you can just plug in and go, cold sites have the shell infrastructure and you have to provide the connectivity. But both of these have a disadvantage in the remote-first world — they are not remote. So how do we classify the temperature associated with our employee's connectivity options?
Well, your hot site is your primary ISP connection, and your warm site could be an LTE/5G hotspot that allows you to leverage cellular connectivity at suitable speeds for posting emojis to Slack. These are all reasonably priced things that could be provided at onboarding, along with some training on how to use them if an employee's primary connection goes down for any period of time.
If you have people on-call, a cellular hotspot should be nothing new. We’re simply expanding the audience to include all remote employees.
But what if there is a prolonged cellular outage, I hear you scream? It already happened once this year in Canada. Well, depending on your needs, the next layer up is satellite communications. The prices of satellite devices are coming down, and it's now possible to get voice comms running over satellite in the hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. For staying in touch with key individuals, such as team leaders, execs, and senior engineers to use a few examples, you could do worse than spending a few hundred bucks per person on a small emergency satellite phone.
Personal Safety
Of course, none of this matters if we can’t keep people safe. Keeping people safe these days includes both physiological health, mental health as well as safety from hostile environments. Supplying personal protective equipment is nothing new for employers, it’s the law in many situations. In regards to Covid especially, but also for whatever the next airborne respiratory illness that comes along is, having a stash of KN95 with each of your employees to help reduce the risk of exposure is a good move.
In terms of personal safety, by some distance, the best thing to do is not put people in situations where they could find themselves at risk. However, realistically, bad things can happen just about anywhere. With the move away from centralized offices, and the physical security measures they afford, more expensive and specialized equipment could now be living in peoples homes, which brings about a wide variety of issues.
Package theft — if people (IT folks for example) are frequently receiving expensive things for work at home, should we be providing them with a secure lockbox to reduce the risk of theft?
Fire — leaving electronics on for longer could increase the risk of fire, how about sending regular reminders to test or replace smoke detectors, perhaps providing refresh allowances, or fire extinguishers?
Personal safety services — a growing trend in urban areas are personal safety services, such as Citizen Protect, which can provide an extra place for employees to turn to if they feel unsafe. Perhaps a company subscription to a service like this should be factored in for employees?
Summary
Everything that we just discussed has a role to play in a BCP/DR plan in the remote/hybrid era. The cost of the majority of these items is more than reasonable when compared to the potential loss of productivity that the lack of them could result in.
If I’m writing out a BCP/DR plan for a remote-first company these days, I’m focusing on employees and making sure they have as much equipment as possible to stay safe and connected because ultimately, that’s what’ll make a difference. You should too.
