The recent extended outage of RIM’s BBM Instant Messaging service and its email service has highlighted the need for organisations to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket.

A lot of companies have built the use of BBM into their Emergency Response Plans as a key part of their Business Continuity planning. Typically, BBM is used by the Incident Management Team to keep constant contact as the incident is managed. The security of BBM and its (usual) high availability has made it an obvious choice for Business Continuity professionals.

The recent problems being experienced by RIM  must be causing some Business Continuity planners some headaches as they ponder whether they should continue to rely on a proprietary environment provided by a single supplier. Single point dependencies are never a good idea in business as they have a dangerous propensity to become single points of failure. They are particularly dangerous when they are used in times of crisis and the organisation is already under a great deal of stress.

Summary

Dependence on a single piece of technology could ruin your business continuity plan. Make sure you have diversity built in to your communications and your people know how to react to a system failure.

Image by De-okin CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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