The meanings of resilience
The meaning of “is”: Many equate “business continuity” with “resilience” — but there are at least four different meanings business people attach to “resilience”; you should address all of them
Most people equate continuity of operations with resilience. This helps, but not much, since different managers read different meanings into the term “resilience.” Some of these different meanings are:
” Continued network operations in the event of a failure
” Uninterrupted access to network applications and data if the data center becomes unavailable
” The ability to use communications systems if lines go down
” The work force’s ability to work productively from alternate locations, like home, if unable to reach the office”
In fact, government continuity of operations plans (COOP) addresses all of the above: network resilience, applications resilience, communications resilience, and work-force resilience. They all build on one another and reinforce each other. Network resilience is required for applications resilience, and communications resilience is required for applications and work-force resilience. Building applications resilience into the network proves vitally important in situations such as fire, flood, server failure, power failure, virus infection and physical destruction of the data center.
