Business continuity

"When information is the key asset, business continuity depends entirely on availability of information and the systems which manage it"

Traditionally, business continuity means planning for the unexpected, to ensure that the organisation can continue to operate and to deliver its services. In practice that has meant planning for eventualities such as the council offices being flooded, an epidemic making a high proportion of staff ill at one time, or a civil emergency that stretches the demand for resources on the public sector.

In the Council of the Future, although the same eventualities will be a possibility, their impact will be much less - so planning for business continuity takes on a different shape.

Take for example, a flood affecting the council office. In a traditionally-run council, this will be a major event; staff will not have access to their workplace, or to their files, or to their computer systems. The work of the council will largely come to halt until temporary facilities can be arranged - typically taking several days. But in the Council of the future, staff are not tied to particular desks - they can work anywhere, including from home; the information they need is not held on files, so access to the office no longer matters, and as the access to their information is through the Internet, they can access their work from any comuter, including, for example, an Internet cafe. So at a stroke one of the major threats to business continuity disppears.

Much the same applies to staff being taken out of action through illness or, say, a transport strike. For some, working at home will be an option (assuming they are well enough to do so), but as the Council of the Future is more of a commissioner of services than a direct provider, it will be able to draw on a wider pool of resource than its own direct employees.

In the Council of the Future, one asset along is crucial to the on-going delivery of services - information - and so long as it is available and accessible through the computer systems, the council can continue to operate. So business continuity takes on a different shape - now it becomes much simpler, and focuses on resilience built into the server and network systems, multi-site replication, virtualisation of the servers, software as a service, thin client, cloud computing and other technologies to ensure that all the corporate information eggs are not in the one computer basket.