Is your back-up IT infrastructure in a safe location? A multi-criteria approach to location analysis for business continuity facilities

Building redundant capacity into an organization’s information technology (IT) infrastructure is a standard part of business continuity planning (BCP). Traditionally, cost concerns have dominated the decision of where to locate the redundant facilities. However; recently managers are becoming more aware of the fact that the very issues that make the main IT facilities vulnerable to disruption (i.e. man-made or natural disasters) are likely to impact the redundant (back-up facilities as well. This complicates the process of selecting redundant facility location(s). The problem is essentially a multi-criteria decision problem, and can be addressed using the location analysis techniques that have been used in other domains in the past. Meanwhile, what make this context somewhat unique are the decision criteria and the rather subjective nature of the decision process. This paper provides a simple decision model for the problem, and illustrates the model with a case where relevant decision criteria are identified and the solution is obtained using a mix of objective and subjective decision techniques. We believe the paper is valuable because it presents an actionable methodology for practitioners involved in BCP.