The 7 R's of Resiliency: Resiliency Strategies
All of the terminology and options tossed around in the world of business continuity management are enough to make your head spin. We've made it easier to understand with the 7 R's, which describe the different options a company has when implementing a business continuity strategy.
By identifying and implementing various recovery strategies for potential threats before they occur, your company can enhance its ability to recover and resume operations after a disruption. These seven recovery strategies can help to assess plausible options for mitigating risk and improving resiliency.
| Strategy |
Summary |
Benefits |
Challenges |
Relocate |
Physically move people and resources to work from another location (home, other company location, business partner site, contracted workplace recovery site) |
- Retains unique skills of relocated staff
- If the right technology is available, work quality should not suffer
- Cost-effective if the right space is available
|
- Requires implementation and regular exercising
- Requires a similar space for relocation and regular contact with alternate location
|
Reassign |
Work is performed by a team at a different location or a business partner |
- Allows impacted site to focus on recovery
- Does not require relocation of people
- Good for standardized processes
|
- Reassignment teams must be familiar with the process and have spare capacity
- Reassigned work may disrupt the regular work of the reassignment team
- Requires detailed documentation of processes
|
Replicate |
Work is always done at multiple locations, so work can continue at the other location(s) at reduced capacity if one location is disrupted |
- High resiliency, as the outage in one location does not affect production
- Good for processes with immediate recovery time objectives
- Becomes part of normal business
- Least disruptive to the organization
|
- Expensive
- Requires redundancy (i.e., slack/spare capacity)
|
Repair/Replace |
Repair and replace damaged assets through contractual arrangements (such as drop-ship contracts), spare capacity, or replacing at time of incident |
- Little time and resource expenditure prior to loss
- Suitable for items with long recovery time objectives
|
- Long replacement times could severely impact company
- Teams and processes are occupied by repair effort post-disaster, which are costlier than preventive strategies
|
Reinforce |
Physically enhance assets (e.g., add fire suppression systems, generators |
- Preventative measures
- Usually enhances existing business processes
- Reduces the number and severity of disruptions
- Often increases safety
|
|
Risk Transfer |
Transfer the risk by purchasing insurance or similar products that cover business interruption |
- Guarantees some degree of financial stability
- Provides time to recover while maintaining business accounts
|
- May not cover every type of disaster
- May be cost-prohibitive
|
Relinquish |
"Do Nothing" (resource is deemed unjustifiably costly or impossible to protect) |
- No time and resource expenditure prior to loss
|
- "Do nothing" strategy lends itself to reactive response
- Shows little confidence in the company’s people, process, and technology
|
