Quite a number of companies that I speak to tell me that their business continuity plan is to send everyone home and ask them to work from there in the event of an incident. For all companies these days, even regulated ones, a significant proportion of their staff can quite happily work from home. However, a core of the business still needs to work closely (physically) together. This is most often the crisis management team and core business functions and generally works out to be around 10% of staff, depending on the industry.

Improvements in buildings and infrastructure mean that the likelihood of the more traditional risks, fires and floods, have waned. However, new risks have taken their place, such as cyber attack and in cities particularly, long term denial of access.

The problem with the ‘send everyone home’ solution is twofold. Firstly, most often staff will leave their laptops in the office overnight and during lunch breaks or offsite meetings. Companies are really struggling to ensure that staff take laptops offsite with them. The result is that if they are required to work from home they will have to rely on their own technology or a company will need to buy, image and configure sufficient infrastructure at the time of the incident to support its remote workforce. This is difficult to test prior to the event.

But perhaps the most significant failing in the choice to send everyone home lies in the increasingly likely event that the organisation gets hit by ransomware, or indeed any other type of malware that locks down infrastructure. In this event, they will have all the PCs that they need but will be unable to use them – whether they take them home or not.

This is where work area recovery comes in. Providing access to replacement PCs and Office within an hour of an incident, this solution should set the company back just 0.3% of the cost of providing your main office. It will also provide technical support to ensure the core team is up and working quickly, while your in-house IT team is busy recovering your home infrastructure – after all, they cannot be in two places at the same time.

Whilst the option to simply send staff home may seem like a cost effective solution, it really does not meet the effective, repeatable and testable criteria most auditors would want a plan to meet.


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