Going Beyond Recovery to Continuity: Lessons Learned

The main campus of The George Washington University is located just a few blocks from the White House. The series of events surrounding 9/11 helped to accelerate advancement of a university-wide business continuity (BC) program years ahead of many other universities. Starting six years ago, the central IT program started the planning process for its disaster recovery program with a comprehensive risk assessment, something only about 11 percent of universities have completed to date. Over time the program has evolved from a focus on IT recovery from failure and disaster to a proactive program focused on fault-tolerant continuous modes of operations. In the last two years the focus has shifted and matured to university-wide emergency management and preparedness. Much has been learned over the past six years that will be shared during this presentation, including approaches to help facilitate reliable and continuous modes of operations, the importance of communications, and how to sell and pay for BC. GW will also share their departmental guides and templates for BC planning and assessment and answer questions about BC.