office 2007 in business continuity whitepaper: microsoft corporation

Microsoft Office 2007: A Platform for Business Continuity

Secure, efficient collaboration to better prepare,

respond, and recover

White Paper

Published: June 2008

For the latest information, please see www.microsoft.com/peopleready

http://www.microsoft.com/peopleready

Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................1

Defining BCM ..............................................................................................................................2

Why Engage in BCM? ............................................................................................................2

Recent History ........................................................................................................................3

The 2007 Office System Supports Best Practices for BCPs ......................................................5

Scenario 1: Creating the BCP ................................................................................................7

Scenario 2: Ensuring Continuous Customer Care .................................................................8

Scenario 3: Ensuring Business Continuity in the Oil and Gas Industry .................................9

Scenario 4: Ensuring Business Continuity in the Supply Chain .......................................... 11

Scenario 5: Ensuring Communications During a Disaster .................................................. 11

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 13

Microsoft Office 2007 – A Platform for Business Continuity 1

Introduction

Business continuity management (BCM) in companies across all industries and sectors has important implications for the health and well being of the economy and the people who drive it. Potentially, all business activity is subject to disruption. While catastrophic events like hurricanes or acts of war dominate the headlines, planned maintenance events and unplanned business disruptions inevitably occur in all sectors of the economy. In fact, more than 90 percent of business-threatening incidents are never reported.

At the same time, management and executives are realizing that choosing the right technology platform for BCM and for creating business continuity plans (BCPs) is a critical success factor in an organization’s overall health.

This paper provides a definition and overview of BCM and the business case for engaging in BCM for organizations across many different sectors. It describes the emergence of best practices and discusses how the 2007 Microsoft® Office system—an integrated system of programs, servers, and services—supports those best practices as a cost-effective, integrated platform for BCM. The paper concludes with a series of real-world examples that demonstrate the applicability of the 2007 Office system in a wide variety of use case scenarios.


Defining BCM

The purpose of business continuity management (BCM) is to ensure a corporation’s resilience to business disruptions, either planned or unplanned, by identifying in advance those events that will negatively affect its ability to achieve its key objectives. These objectives will vary from organization to organization, but two key elements include:

Incorporating an element of proactive risk mitigation. Risk management is the

ongoing process of assessing predefined, acceptable levels of risk to the business by

monitoring mission-critical business processes to ensure they do not exceed those

levels of risk.

Involving groups from many departments and hierarchical levels across the

organization. BCM is a holistic management process that reaches from senior

management to line workers, and across all divisions, sites and vendors.

BCM is a holistic strategy, and its success rests on widespread endorsement. BCM enables the organization to continue to deliver on a predefined level of services and goods during a wide variety of business disruptions, including those that may not meet the definition of a disaster. In general, BCM safeguards the corporation from any damage to its reputation and its economic viability at all times.

As a key element of BCM, a business continuity plan (BCP) is a documented collection of plans and procedures that is developed and maintained for use before, during, and after a planned or unplanned business disruption at varying levels of severity. As such, it is more than a disaster recovery plan, which focuses on a set of procedures around restoring a company’s ability to provide its goods and services during and after a business disruption. Disaster recovery plans often focus on separate departments.

Why Engage in BCM?

Although research shows that 75 percent of companies in the United States have no experience with disasters, there are many compelling reasons for creating a business continuity plan (BCP):

You may be required by law to set up a disaster recovery plan.

Your business can fail if you do not properly plan how to recover from disaster.

Proper planning protects your directors from liability and your investors from financial

loss.

Disasters are a very real risk to the operation of your business.

According to a popular 2007 business continuity study:

Nearly 25 percent of those surveyed say their company has suffered from a disaster.

Of companies that suffered from a disaster, 12 percent lost less than $100,000 a day,

3 percent lost $100,000 to $500,000 a day, and 1 percent lost more than $1 million

per day.

Another recent study reveals that more than 60 percent of businesses that lose their computer data, and that do not have adequate backup, go out of business.


Today, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act strongly encourages all publicly traded companies to develop a BCP. In fact, organizations across all industries face increasing pressure to conform to regulations that protect themselves and their management from liability, and protect their investors from financial loss. Some of these regulations include:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the medical

sector.

FFIEC FIL-67-67 for the financial services and banking sector. For example, financial

institutions examined by the FFIEC must rewrite their pandemic responses to deal

with the possibility of extended 40 percent peak absentee rates.

SEC regulations for public companies.

Consumer Credit Protection Act (CCPA) section 2001 Title IX for e-commerce

transactions.

A new, independent standard for BCP called BS 25999, released in December 2006

by the British Standards Institute. This standard applies to organizations across all

industry sectors and of all types, sizes, and missions, whether governmental or

private, profit or nonprofit.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act – 2002.

Business continuity planning is now seen as a priority by more than 69 percent of IT executives in the United States. Similarly, a recent survey reports that 56 percent of 1,017 IT decision makers at North American and European enterprises said purchasing or upgrading disaster recovery capabilities is either a critical or important priority during the next 12 months.

Analyst groups also report a growing recognition of the competitive advantage of emergency preparedness, crisis management, business continuity, and business resiliency.

Recent History

The evolution of business continuity management (BCM) among corporations indicates a growing reliance on IT. Originally, most companies limited the scope of BCM activities to within the IT department. These activities concentrated on ensuring data replication, a service provided by commercial, alternate site providers. These providers promised to maintain a company’s critical systems somewhere other than the headquarters or data center. This approach focused on worst-case scenarios. However, with a move away from mainframes, and the rise of application-specific, less-expensive servers and decentralized computing, companies began to reevaluate their BCM practices. They wondered whether it was a good strategy to spend their business continuity budget on worst-case scenarios that meet regulatory requirements but paid little attention to the rest of the business.

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Companies began to realize that in planning for the statistically improbable worst-case scenario, they might be overlooking far more likely, but less severe, business interruption scenarios. In fact, if a company plans only for the worst case scenario, it will miss some very important goals of BCM:

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To mitigate the risk of a less severe, but more likely, business disruption.

1 Kathleen Lucey FBCI, ―Why BC for SMEs Should be Different,‖ Continuity, Vol. 9 Issue 2

2 Ibid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standards_Institute


To manage and monitor conditions identified as critical thresholds to the health of a

business.

To help prepare for, and correct, those critical thresholds before they cause a

disruption.

Today, BCM is expanding beyond IT disaster recovery to include maintaining and restoring mission-critical business processes, personnel, and facilities. The goal is to ensure emergency preparedness and business resiliency. BCM has been broadened to include six major components:

Risk management and mitigation

IT disaster recovery

Business recovery

Business resumption

Contingency planning

Crisis management

In fact, according to some research, many corporations today are extending their security programs to focus more on addressing business risk issues than on responding to tactical security events.

There are a number of reasons for this. While September 11 and Hurricane Katrina were high-profile events that threw disaster recovery into the limelight, behind the scenes organizations have faced their own crises that involved failures in information management, communication, and collaboration systems. As IT continues to play a critical role for information workers to perform the communication, collaboration, and information management processes that constitute everyday business, companies are realizing their value. We have moved into a new world of work, where IT is critical to an organization’s success in managing overwhelming streams of information in an always-on, always-connected digital work environment. Rather than simply focusing on saving the data center in a crisis, organizations are paying more attention to maintaining their communication and collaboration technologies in a wide variety of scenarios.


The 2007 Office System Supports Best Practices for

BCPs

Out of this brief summary, several key requirements emerge that are important best practices for choosing a technology platform that supports business continuity management (BCM). In order to succeed, BCM in general—and business continuity plans (BCPs) in particular—need to have broad visibility across business units. If a company chooses widespread, user-friendly technologies for people across the organization to use when creating and executing BCPs, this helps democratize the concept of BCM throughout the organization. The 2007 Microsoft® Office system client programs are well suited for BCM initiatives because they are familiar, cost-effective, easy to use, integrated, and flexible. Many organizations are already turning the 2007 Office system client programs to amplify the impact of their employees to:

Drive individual productivity.

Work together more effectively.

Get more value out of business information.

Manage content and streamline processes.

If an organization positions BCM as an integral, necessary component of doing business on the same level as, for example, performing inventory management or developing marketing strategies, the company can expect these benefits to apply to BCM as well. The 2007 Office system offers people-ready client software that supports business continuity planning needs:

Microsoft Office Word 2007: Staff can assemble BCP documents by using new

building block features that provide predefined content for quick assembly. They can

choose to share documents in either Portable Document Format (PDF) or XML Paper

Specification (XPS) without third-party tools to include vendors that might not be on

the same technology platform.

Microsoft Open XML Format: Employees can use this for risk mitigation. The new

Office XML Formats enable better data integration with back-end systems, so staff

can easily monitor the health of enterprise business systems by using Office Word

2007 or Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software.

Excel Services: Staff can use, share, secure, and manage Office Excel 2007

workbooks as interactive reports over the Web to collaborate with consultants or

partners in remote locations while developing BCPs, monitoring complex business

processes, or exchanging information during a planned or unplanned event. This

information can be often be leveraged as valuable business intelligence, and

integrates seamlessly with Office Excel 2007 for local analysis and delivery.

Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information gathering program: Staff can use

Office InfoPath 2007 to build flexible electronic forms to efficiently gather information

from different business systems while developing BCPs. They can also create simple

forms and templates for common tasks within BCM, such as after-incident review and

analysis. An effective, usable BCP should be simple and easy to execute under times

of stress. Staff can create automated workflows by using Office InfoPath 2007

electronic forms and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to automate and

simplify workflows within their BCPs.


Microsoft Office Communicator 2007: Staff can use this unified communications

client to reach people in different locations during an event when flexibility in

communications is key to achieving a coordinated response among distributed

parties. They can choose from instant messaging (IM), voice, and video. Integration

with programs across the 2007 Microsoft Office system—including Word, Excel,

Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, Microsoft Office OneNote® 2007, Microsoft Office

Groove® 2007, and SharePoint Server—gives staff many different ways to

communicate with each other via a consistent and simple user experience.

Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007: With a new emphasis on mobility and anywhere,

anytime information access and unified messaging capabilities, Office Outlook 2007

and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 provide a powerful collaboration platform for

BCM. Staff can take advantage of their combined benefits for secure collaboration

and multiple messaging approaches—including e-mail, IM, and integrated voice and

video—to keep communication and collaboration channels open before, during, and

after an event. The 2007 Office system programs offer new levels of coordinated

communications and collaboration through capabilities such as:

o Corporate-wide unified messaging using Exchange Server 2007.

o Secure communications linking people through IM.

o Presence awareness, phone, voice, video and Web conferencing using

Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator

2007.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007: During an event, people can use Office Groove 2007

to work together in dynamic teams that can collaborate securely outside the corporate

firewall and in situations of unpredictable network access, whether they are

connected to the corporate network or not. Because all Office Groove 2007

workspaces and tools are stored on a user’s portable computer, people can continue

to work even if Internet connectivity is unavailable, syncing up to the network

whenever they find a hotspot.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 plays a key supporting role with BCM. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides integrated enterprise-class capabilities to improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information across boundaries.

Seamless integration between the 2007 Office system client programs and servers, such as Office SharePoint Server 2007, means that information workers have a powerful, self-serve collaboration environment that supports workflow-enabled document review, managed reports distribution, and structured information accessible when and where it’s needed. These are key aspects of creating and executing any BCP. Multichannel message dissemination facilitates an integrated stance on crisis situations and reaches a company’s wide range of key stakeholders.

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Integration between the 2007 Office system programs and back-end server-based business processes, databases, and line-of-business processes means that every department can create BCPs that use the same technologies as the rest of the organization. For example, Microsoft Office Excel Services that interface with Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services, or Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 forms that use Web services to automatically update data stored in a line-of-business application, can be used in a wide variety of scenarios. All of these integrated features and functionality support secure corporatewide 3 COMMUNICATIONS EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, MARCH 2006, Primary Brief, www.cec.executiveboard.com

http://www.cec.executiveboard.com/


communications and access to important information before, during, and after a business disruption.

Using the 2007 Office system servers, programs, and services, people are working smarter and harder and collaborating better to develop BCM that exemplifies the following best practices:

Applies to the entire organization through an integrated approach to response.

Addresses a broad spectrum of business disruptions, planned and unplanned.

Addresses a wide range of disruption severity levels.

Acknowledges the importance of maintaining the communication, collaboration, and

information management needs of information workers.

A BCP created by using familiar, common desktop programs tools not only drives adoption, but assures the plan’s usefulness during an event. Employees will balk at learning a new set of tools to handle disruptive events, compromising the efficiency of their response.

The following use case scenarios illustrate the value that the 2007 Office system brings to the table for proactive BCM.

Scenario 1: Creating the BCP

Many organizations are already using the 2007 Microsoft Office system to create BCPs. All employees can therefore take advantage of these same technologies to actually carry out a BCP should an event occur. Using familiar 2007 Office system programs to respond and recover from an event enables everyone to focus on what they need to do, rather than on learning new tools. It is also more cost-effective to take advantage of the tools you already own instead of purchasing stand-alone solutions that do not integrate across the company.

To mitigate risks, companies spend a lot of time performing business analysis across the organization to document each division’s dependences on both technology systems and other departments. That information is stored in databases where it has to be available for analysis and for sharing across the organization as plans are developed to deal with different groups’ vulnerabilities. With the 2007 Office system release, staff can take advantage of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007 to perform advanced analysis directly in Office Excel 2007. Staffers can then use Excel Services to share Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server 2007 portals. And, by using Excel Services, remote teammates or partners can view live, interactive workbooks by using only their browser.

Choosing a platform that is ubiquitous and widely supported throughout the organization so employees don’t have to be trained to collect, analyze, and share data to create a BCP saves time and money. If a company wants to ensure a common consensus on using BCP plans across the organization, Microsoft Office technologies offer all of the requisite data analysis, communication, collaboration, and information presentation needs that people require to build their BCPs right on their desktop. By leveraging these same tools and technologies organization-wide to build PCPs, these plans can be endorsed and embraced more readily on a company-wide basis: a prerequisite for their success should a disruptive incident occur.


Scenario 2: Ensuring Continuous Customer Care

The call centers for the customer care program of a large, multinational corporation are located all over the world and are subject to disruptions from events outside of their control. The corporation has a small business continuity team responsible for maintaining uninterrupted customer service around the globe, but the team is well prepared for business disruption scenarios in customer care. IT has developed a Microsoft Office-based series of BCPs that address scenarios that range from ―location unavailable‖ to ―tools unavailable‖ to ―network unavailable.‖

In addition, this company has taken advantage of the fact that many Microsoft partners are developing additional solutions by using Microsoft Office-based technologies to augment a corporation’s BCP. In this case, the company chose a partner solution called E•SPONDER from Convergence Communications that focuses on incident management response and helps to automate the creation of call trees. Based on the 2007 Office system, the solution integrated seamlessly into the Office SharePoint Server workflows already included in the company’s BCP. Within the E•SPONDER solution, staff can use Office InfoPath 2007 to develop and deliver the forms for information gathering, and they can write documents by using Office Word 2007 or analyze data by using Office Excel 2007.

When the business continuity team learned of an upcoming transport strike in one location, they looked at their BCP for a scenario called ―people unavailable‖ and began to put the plan into action. The team knew the strike would last approximately 12 hours, so they posted Office Word 2007 strategy documents to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site to communicate their plans to the 1,000 affected engineers, so the engineers could make alternate plans to get to work. They used IM, e-mail, and phone conferencing with duty managers to ensure the managers were on track with staffing arrangements. Each duty manager took charge of their piece of the business, communicating out to the engineers via mobile phone, IM, and e-mail to make sure people came in a day early and found hotels near the call center to stay overnight. During the event, they relied on Microsoft Exchange and Office Communicator 2007 to send out notifications. They also kept log notes on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. Duty managers shared their experiences with each other on their own SharePoint sites, and these were useful for after-incident reviews.

In the end, the company was able to staff the call center adequately and there was no disruption to service. Microsoft Office programs such as Office Outlook 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, integrated with Exchange Server 2007, worked well because they supported a distributed response within a collaborative, organized environment. While still enforcing a top-down hierarchy, the BCP plan included leeway for the duty managers to take their local knowledge dealing with a political situation and tweak the plans according to their expertise. The duty managers used the same Microsoft Office programs to communicate with their engineers as they did to report back on their situation so everyone was aware of what was going on.

In fact, the event management process where people use Microsoft Office servers, programs and services is a key element of all of the BCP plans for this customer care organization. While the company has built redundancy into its physical network and invested in resilient, fault-tolerant network applications and systems, the fact remains that it is the Microsoft Office-based, event management component of the plan where people need to communicate and collaborate that is essential to mitigate business impact during an event.

Fact: …companies are prioritizing customer-facing IT services — customer support, e-mail and phone systems — in their business continuity plans. Only corporate financial systems received a higher ranking. 1


Figure 1: SharePoint-based Business Continuity Portal for managing processes and information.

Scenario 3: Ensuring Business Continuity in the Oil and Gas Industry

A multinational oil corporation has to perform a routine well work-over. This is part of routine maintenance for oil companies; however, it does impact the company’s production because the well has to be shut down for a period of time. The company uses Office Excel 2007, Excel Services, and Office InfoPath 2007 to not only execute the well work-over, but also to perform key process equipment monitoring to assess, for example, when vibrations on a compressor are approaching abnormally high levels. Engineers and operators out in the field are constantly monitoring wells, evaluating flow rates, temperatures, and other operational data. They use Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites along with Office Communicator 2007 and VoIP capabilities to collaborate in real time over large geographical distances, making decisions about when to intervene and how to mitigate the impact to the business.

When production declines to the point that a well work-over is scheduled, engineers access and share Office Word 2007 engineering documents and Office Excel 2007 spreadsheets using an Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal to manage this planned business incident. In this case, sand has infiltrated the well bore in an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and the company has to stop production to set up a rig over the well and send sand-screens down the bore to clean it out. This requires collaboration among engineers and third-party equipment and service providers. Large numbers of documents, drawings, calculations, permits, and modeling designs are generated, shared, and stored before, during, and after a typical 6-week well work-over at a cost of about a quarter of a million dollars.

It’s in the company’s best interest to achieve a speedy and efficient well work-over, so it uses a Microsoft Office-based BCP to ensure a quick return to business as usual. The managing engineer sets up an Office Groove 2007 workspace for all required participants in the process, and exports necessary documentation from existing document libraries on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. He doesn’t have to worry about setting up security for third-party access to internal systems. Inside the Office Groove 2007 workspace, people can check documents in and out. Office Groove 2007 automatically updates all changes to the documents, facilitating communication and collaboration among virtual teams. During the work-over, people used Live Meeting and Office Communicator 2007 to connect with experts and collaborate online. Six weeks later, when the work-over is complete, the site can be disbanded and all pertinent documentation is checked back into a permanent Office SharePoint Server 2007 repository behind the corporate firewall.


The 2007 Office system at this oil corporation supports a whole continuum of scenarios that range from monitoring the business to mitigating the impact of routine maintenance to extraordinary events, like a well blow out. The level of severity of the business incident becomes less important, because the response mechanisms for all are based on familiar, everyday tools.

This oil and gas corporation also chose the 2007 Microsoft Office system as a foundation for its BCM practices because the platform easily adapts to the complex, highly collaborative, document-centric nature of its business. A typical set of books for a refinery is 30 feet long. Every drawing, every calculation, every nut and bolt on a well is documented, approved, and stamped. All papers are routed through complex document versioning and collaboration, all according to regulations. With this much documentation around, it is not unheard-of to lose valuable business information. For example, a set of books documenting field research for a new well compiled by teams of engineers in the field and containing logs for well planning represents a $10 million dollar investment for an oil company. Now that more and more oil and gas companies are digitizing their documentation, they are using Office SharePoint Server 2007 enterprise search as an important tool to protect themselves from the loss of valuable information and to ensure they are in compliance with industry regulations.

Figure 2: Using intermittently connected clients and portal infrastructure for collaborating and communicating.


Scenario 4: Ensuring Business Continuity in the Supply Chain

Companies’ growing reliance on third-party suppliers around the world is increasing their vulnerability to business disruptions from natural disasters and man-made catastrophes.

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Companies that do not ensure the security and resiliency of their supply chains will have difficulty acquiring the materials and transporting the goods that ensure timely business operations and great customer service.

It is essential for a company to work together with its partners in supply networks to identify risks and improve preparedness. The 2007 Office system provides an ideal platform for communications across corporate networks, so partners can share information about threats and collaborate on developing joint BCPs, and to actually conduct mock drills and practices. During an emergency, companies need to collaborate securely with multiple agencies and organizations across networks, firewalls, and technologies, with unreliable network access. Together, Office Groove 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 deliver the ideal platform for business continuity in the supply chain scenario. As many first responder agencies have found, these technologies help to reduce the impact of jurisdictional borders, enabling different agencies to communicate and share information security across agency networks as they work together during and after emergencies.

Scenario 5: Ensuring Communications During a Disaster

Following an ice storm, a mid-sized technology company found itself without power for two weeks. Like 42 percent of business technology managers recently surveyed, the CIO of this company had identified the ability for workers to access corporate resources remotely in the event of a disruption as an area of weakness in her BCP. She decided to address the issue by using the 2007 Office system programs because her employees were already familiar with them and she had the technology already installed on everyone’s desktops.

This CIO simply took advantage of her existing investments in Office technologies to ensure that key players in the company could communicate with each other despite intermittent Internet connectivity — a cost-effective alternative to buying third-party solutions.

Having installed Office Groove 2007 on all employees’ portable computers, the company was able to operate almost without impact when the storm hit. It was too dangerous to drive to work, so employees were encouraged to stay at home. Even with no Internet connection at the office or at home for many for many of the employees because of the storm, business continued to be done. One employee used Office Groove 2007 to connect seamlessly on and off the Web when he discovered that his neighbor had power and an intermittent Internet connection and was willing to share his access key. He walked up to the neighbor’s to send and receive e-mail messages with other employees and to share files and documents with co-workers on a team project. Every time he connected, Office Groove 2007

4 Bill Roberts, ―Supply Chain Disasters Await,‖ Journal of the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit, http://www.microsoft.com/htsummit

Fact: The very nature of business itself is changing and becoming increasingly externalized, with systems access and the transfer of information no longer confined within well-defined corporate networks. 1

Fact: A surprising 19 percent of organizations have no plan whatsoever for assuring business continuity, with these enterprises most often blaming cost as the key barrier. 14

http://www.microsoft.com/htsummit


automatically updated his Office Word 2007 documents, keeping track of versioning. He used Office Groove 2007 to see who was online and, therefore, who had power. Sometimes he drove over to their houses to continue work, taking comfort in the fact that if it was absolutely necessary he could still communicate as required to keep up with the business.

For this mid-sized business, the 2007 Office system, including Office Groove 2007, provided a cost-effective technology solution to ensure business continuity during a severe, unplanned natural event.

Figure 3: Communication and Collaboration using Office Groove 2007 in intermittent communications situation.


Conclusion

The 2007 Microsoft® Office system provides business value in the business continuity space

for corporations because they already possess the software they need to create plans and

manage events. They are familiar and require minimal training, ensuring corporatewide

endorsement of business plans and facilitating cross-corporation communications with

suppliers and third-party agencies during an event. They focus on the communication and

collaboration capabilities key to maintaining business as usual, using business-as-usual tools.

Finally, they are cost-effective. Microsoft Office technologies that support business continuity

plans are not expensive add-ons; instead, they leverage the communication and collaboration

capabilities in the most commonly used software currently licensed by most organizations.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

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