December 29, 2004

Disaster Planning and Recovery from an affected 9-11 small business owner

There's no one better qualified to speak about a subject than one who has gone through the process.

On 11 September 2001, Donna Childs, Founder of Child's Capital and her company were displaced from lower Manhattan with thousands of other small and large businesses. Many of the larger businesses had contingency plans in place. Unfortunately many smaller-businesses did not and suffered huge economic losses and/or went out of business altogether.

Donna's book, "Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery" is filled with examples of businesses who did and did not do proper planning. Her book is full of practical steps every business owner should take to protect their business from disaster.

Disaster planning and recovery is comprised of three steps: Preparation, Response and Recovery and "Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery" covers issues that you might have not thought of such as protecting your business from attacks via mail and even how to reduce your mail intake.

Your IT infrastructure is critical in ensuring that your business survives a disaster and "Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery" thoroughly covers this topic and includes data backup, human error and training, software, network and telecommunication failures amongst other topics.

I liked the resources such as FEMA, SCORE and others that are included in the book, making it more than an "academic" exercise but a valuable resource you can use to help plan your businesses survivability in the event of a disaster.

Donna does a great job of combining case studies, statistics and practical steps YOU should take to protect your business - I highly suggest you buy the book today.

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