The document discusses alternative work areas as part of business continuity management. It describes how alternative work areas can help ensure business processes can continue during an outage by providing workstations, applications, and other resources to allow personnel to work remotely. Well-designed alternative work areas provide ergonomic workspaces, amenities like cafeterias and dormitories, and recreation to help reduce stress and allow personnel to focus on recovery tasks. The document emphasizes that while IT disaster recovery focuses on systems, business continuity management must also address ensuring people and processes can continue through maintaining alternative work areas.

1. A small handout on
Alternative Work Area in
Business
Continuity
Management
About Author
Amit Abhyankar
AVP & Practice Head - BCP
Amit Abhyankar is an AVP and a Practice Head for
Omnitech’s Business Continuity Services division. He
has a total of 20 years of professional experience, of
which, the past 4 years have been exclusively spent in
developing the Business Continuity Services for
Omnitech. His present role as a Practice Head involves
evangelizing BCM, business development, driving top
line as well bottom line growth for the division and
identifying strategic geographical locations where
Omnitech can o er Business Continuity Services to a
January 2011 global clientele. He has recently been awarded the
Member grade by the BCI.
www.omnitechglobal.com

2. 01
Introduction
As businesses become increasingly competitive, the pressure of being able to meet customer and regulatory mandates increases multifold.
Compliances such as BASEL II, HIPAA, and SOX cannot be wished away. Add to this, Corporate Governance policies and stricter SLAs and we
have a perfect recipe for insomnia!
While most CIOs would be confident about the resilience of their IT systems, one needs to introspect honestly whether their CEOs exude the
same confidence with respect to availability of ‘personnel’ and ‘processes’ during potential outages.
Pillars of Business Continuity
CIOs are responsible for IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plans but these
plans generally do not cover People and Processes since it’s beyond
scope.
DR focuses on recovery of Data and Equipment. But Business Continu-
ity Management (BCM) is an inclusive term and a superset of DR.
Hence, IT teams must realize that while they may have IT DR in place,
they may not have resilience at business level.
Two additional pillars ensuring successful recovery are ‘People’ and
‘Processes’. For both one may need a formal site known as Alternate
Work Area and the strategy of keeping such recovery sites in
‘perpetual readiness’ is called Work Area Recovery (WAR) prepared-
ness. There are schools of thought that profess ‘work from home’ or
other ad hoc solutions which may be effective but not necessarily
robust and bound by SLAs.
A typical Work Area
Recovery Site
An ‘alternate site’ is an arrangement done to continue work at alternate premises in case of an outage. Such a site has to address the require-
ments for recovery of Processes, Equipments and People pillars adequately to qualify as a WAR site as follows
Processes – Workstations, access to applications, databases, voice solutions, resilient power (UPS+DG Set) determined by the process
RTOs
ICT – Structured cabling, networking equipment, resilient connectivity, communication infrastructure, reprographics, NOC
Security – Secured access, physical and logical security, Intelligent Building Management Systems, SOC
People – Ergonomic furniture, on-demand medical assistance, R&R (Recuperation & Recreation) Cafeteria, Dormitory, TV, indoor games
Copyright © 2011 Omnitech InfoSolutions Ltd Alternative Work Area in Business Continuity Management

3. 02
BCM is more about People
People are likely to react differently, guided by circumstances and emotions. Even trained key personnel can fumble in adverse situations, feel
despair, or completely give-up. Worse-they may refuse to report to work, citing family priorities. This will lead to a complete collapse of
planned recovery procedures as no organization has 100% automation and people dependence is inevitable.
During outage, IT teams can simply switch pointers to the DRC but the process teams need to move to the alternate site, sometimes under
adverse conditions such as fire, malicious insider attack, terror attack, or a catastrophe. They are likely to have witnessed loss of human life
and the stress can be overwhelming. Under such conditions, simply ‘switching’ over to the alternate site and resuming operation can be
extremely challenging!
Experts across the world agree that BCM is all about people. To ensure that recovery strategies are implemented and executed successfully
one has to invest in people, training, motivation, and wellbeing.
The R&R facilities of professional WAR sites will are much needed during these trying times, as they can help mitigate trauma and allow recov-
ery personnel to focus more on given tasks and achieve the RTO and RPO as desired and bring about recovery.
BCM Initiatives
By making BCM a Boardroom Agenda and driving it through a formal BCM policy is the surest way of ensuring BCM readiness.
It has to get embedded in the organization’s culture! This involves training, practicing, learning from mistakes, carrying out Root Cause Analy-
sis, followed by retraining.
The organization should provide incentives to personnel to voluntarily become a part of BCM culture and reward employees who display
high level of enthusiasm.
Way Ahead
While the approach to BCM is always a Science, its adaptation to meet the local compulsions will always remain an Art! However, ambiguities
can be put to rest by referring to BS25999, which is the global standard, defined by BSI and accepted globally.
Organizations have positions of independent BC Managers with clear career paths and certifications in BCM equip candidates with requisite
knowledge and qualifications.
Protecting revenues through BCM is as important as focusing on growth. The dictum of “a penny saved is a penny earned” is relevant in
business as an outage may not only mean temporarily lost revenues but permanently lost reputation and customers.
Copyright © 2011 Omnitech InfoSolutions Ltd Alternative Work Area in Business Continuity Management

4. 03
About Omnitech
Omnitech is a global IT solutions and services provider company in the areas of business availability, business continuity and business
enhancement services. With over 23 years of fostering client relationships, we at Omnitech are agile to establish the best global credentials
through world class quality certifications. Besides the conduct of ISO 9001:2008 Surveillance audit for quality management, we have also
gained ISO 20000, ISO 27001and BS 25999 standards.
As an intensely technology focused company, Omnitech banks upon its ability to anticipate and address IT requirements across business in
a cost effective manner. Omnitech InfoSolutions helps customers to align their IT with their business goals and offers value added services at
different phases of their IT planning and deployment cycle. We help them to derive optimum utilization of their IT resources and lower their
cost of operations. Within the broad direction, Omnitech innovates in order to compete successfully. Emerging as a pioneer in business
continuity services, Omnitech introduced first of its kind disaster recovery centre in India meeting all the global standards, thereby demon-
strating both its knowledge of technology and skills of implementation.
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InfoSolutions Ltd. The content / information contained here is correct at the time
of publishing. No material from here should be copied, modified, reproduced,
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other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties.
Copyright © 2011 Omnitech InfoSolutions Ltd.
Disclaimer
The views presented in this document are the personal views/opinions of the
author and not of the organization he represents and is only informative in
nature. It is neither purported to be relied upon nor be used as a substitute for
specific professional advice.
Copyright © 2011 Omnitech InfoSolutions Ltd Alternative Work Area in Business Continuity Management