Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 1, April 2009

Preparing for the unthinkable

As the industry's dependence and interdependence on IT has grown, so have the consequences of IT risk. Organizations must implement proactive approaches to reducing IT risk significantly through the application of proven business continuity planning (BCP) methodologies.

IT risk matters now more than ever. Incidents caused by natural or accidental events are increasing in frequency and intensity. More alarmingly, deliberate acts of destruction are also on the rise. "Off-shoring" functions such as systems development or IT operations to dangerous or unstable parts of the world can also significantly increase IT risk.

This begs the questions:

Do air transport organizations and their third-party integrated system providers have a business continuity plan in place?
How do those plans protect and recover applications and data?
Have those plans been tested?

More than disaster recovery planning

Business continuity is defined as a management process that identifies potential impacts that could threaten an organization. It then provides a framework to help the organization counteract the risks and build additional resilience.

Unlike disaster recovery planning, business continuity planning seeks to provide return on investment for resilience against specific risks, by analyzing and prioritizing approaches based on quantifiable business impacts. It can be viewed as a solution designed to address risk factors and their related elements, all of which can contribute to interruptions in service.

The plan should be comprehensive and tailored to fit an organization's unique needs. The best plans remain product and service agnostic. As a result, organizations can rest assured that the approach is indeed the most appropriate and beneficial to their success - free of undue influence or hidden agendas. With no hardware or service provider affiliations involved, solutions consist only of what's necessary to achieve the organization's business continuity objectives.

All players in the air transport industry have a need for a practical plan to ensure resiliency throughout the business continuity hierarchy. The best plans create an infrastructure that is capable of providing that resiliency with a proven combination of planning, implementation, operational, and testing services.

What is IT risk?

Failure due to unplanned events can have substantial business impact, as happened to three airlines in recent years:

A failed backup generator at a control centre led to the cancellation of over 70 percent of scheduled flights, with over 50,000 passengers stranded
The failure of a crew scheduling system resulted in over US$ 20 million in lost revenue
When a severe storm overwhelmed internal operations systems, more than US$ 30 million of revenue was lost