• Personnel issues will be your primary concern — your plans should take into account your employees’ personal needs.

• Power failures take down telecommunications — network providers and individual phone batteries require electricity.

• Travel and transportation will be restricted — plan for disabled vehicles, limited rental car availability and dwindling fuel supplies.

• Critical facilities should not be located in close proximity.

• Resources should be staged in safe areas — switching equipment, generators and fuel tanks should be located above flood levels.

• Data management challenges will arise — backup systems should not require physical connectivity to your infrastructure.

• Insurance coverage is often inadequate — understand your coverage before disaster strikes,

  and document activities for adjusters.

• Hardware may be damaged — develop and test a plan for replacing equipment and for disposing of unusable devices.

As you create or update your business continuity plans, you’ll need to consider a number of areas that extend beyond the strict province of IT. An effective business continuity plan calls for an interdisciplinary, organization-wide approach. It should take into account the potential for a disaster to strike across an entire region, bringing down external infrastructures and supply chains. And it should incorporate both proactive and reactive elements. Many components, such as meeting service levels, data continuity and regulatory compliance, deliver additional business benefits. In our view, each aspect of such a comprehensive program complements the others; how much you need of each will depend on your existing state of readiness, your industry and your overall business goals.

Regardless of your particular business continuity and disaster recovery needs, you’ll need to think proactively about your strategy. You don’t want to be in the middle of an earthquake when you learn that all of your data centers are vulnerable. There is no one-size-fits-all solution — an approach based on meeting your business priorities will have your own unique stamp. The most successful programs will probably be a hybrid of lessons learned from recent disasters and careful planning. The key is to base your approach on an inventory of your prioritized business processes, so you can ensure that the organization itself recovers — and not just the infrastructure.