Miles Associates LLC

How to Evaluate BC/DR Consultants

Five questions to help weed out the posers from the real deal. Plus: a checklist of topics a BC/DR consultant should know.

by Stacy Collett,July 11, 2008

Siemens IT Solutions and Services always had a solid business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan in place. But it wasn’t until 9/11 that BC/DR planners truly understood what was lacking.

“We probably had the larger things covered, but on a moment’s notice we were not as well put together as we could have been,” says Debbie Hoppenjans, manager of business continuity planning. “It made us, as a company, really take a step back and look at what we would do.”

So the company began its search for business continuity consulting services. But it wasn’t exactly thrilled with most of its prospects.

“There seem to be a lot of them out there, and from our experience a lot of them are not very good,” says CISO Dave Bixler.