Home Continuity

Regardless of the difference between different cultures, we can identify different scenarios that could be more or less common when talking about home business continuity. Analyzing five components supporting the business identified in the standard BS25999-1, we can determine the following:

• People: It would consist of the inhabitants of the home, whether family, people who share a flat, etc..
• Premises :  including home plus appendices (garages, etc.)
• Information, in both formats: paper and electronic. We all have documents in our homes that could be important e irreplaceable, such as contracts, deeds, official documents, etc.. Furthermore, an increasing amount of information in electronic: photos, videos, documents in our HDD, etc.
• Technology : perhaps less critical component, since their service is personal and easily restorable.
• Supplies: traditionally four: electricity, water, gas and telephone.

The following step is define the scenarios that could be part of the scope of our home continuity program and that can be identified as more probable or not depending on the threats of the area in which the home is located. Some examples of scenarios could be:

• Loss of information (mainly in hdd)
• Power outage, with different durations
• Flood
• Fire
• Severe Inclement weather: heavy snow or storms, Hurricane
• Big disasters: Earthquakes, nuclear incidents, etc.

Some of this scenarios are more or less common. For example, some years ago there was a gas blast
50 meters from my house. Although we can think that a lot of damage can be covered by insurance, perhaps there are things that can not be restored with money.

If we analyze the firs scenario of above, sure it has happened to a lot of people: we can loss all information in our hdd, including photographs, videos, etc, so our home continuity program must define the mechanisms that we're going to use to safeguard the information There are some options, like burn CDs and carry them to a different location (the hose of a relative, for example) or upload photos or videos to a cloud service, like google drive or dropbox.

We have to continue with the other scenarios in order to develop our hole Home Continuity Plan and be sure that we are not going to loss what we store in our homes. Testing would be funny, specifically if you have young children.