Business Continuity and The Financial Crisis

Has the current financial crisis impacted your business continuity program? After talking to several of my clients and prospects I learned that the answer to that question is all over the board. Most of these folks play in the financial services market. Because IT-Lifeline plays in the small to medium size business market, almost 40% of those I talked to expected to experience a negative impact on their business continuity activities. Check out this article from ContinuityCentral.com discussing a survey they conducted regarding the impact of the financial crisis on the business continuity market. In the survey they touched on impact, spending patterns, staffing, and regulatory expectations.

The response to the question regarding “more” regulations was interesting to me. Just less than half (44%) expected to see more regulations regarding business continuity. A little over half (56%) expected no change and none one expected less! I guess I could conclude from this that the need for business continuity planning will not go away!!

As one could expect, those in the financial services industry were expecting new or more regulatory scrutiny – go figure!