The Future of Business Continuity Tools and Techniques

Ian Crabb

While the business continuity management (BCM) industry has continued to develop since its emergence from IT disaster recovery in the late 1980s, the underlying principles and techniques used by BCM professionals have broadly remained the same.

Tools to support BCM have been widely available over the same period, and have continued to develop both in maturity and functionality. However, such tools have not been adopted by the majority of organisations in supporting their BCM programmes, with many BCM professionals continuing to choose end-user computing technologies (standard office products) to service their BCM needs.

This is counter to other areas of business management, where tools are considered to be a vital component in bringing efficacy of process, providing greater control, driving down cost of ownership and delivering added business value.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer the following key questions:

• • what are the common obstacles and constraints that have prohibited BCM tools from being more widely adopted?

• • what are the challenges that BCM tools must meet to be successful?

• • what are the influencing factors that