Press Release Summary: Comment from Luisa D'Alessandro, Associate in the Commercial Services Department and IT law specialist at Berg Legal, on business risk & disaster planning.
Press Release Body: "Management of legal IT issues is a key area in ensuring that business risk is properly managed. As businesses increasingly rely on IT systems, whether website presence, customer facing systems or back office management systems, ensuring that the correct contractual issues are properly addressed at the outset can mean that problems can be avoided or at least dealt with more effectively further down the line should things go wrong.
"Any business procuring a key function IT system must consider the key business risks which may result from system fault and look at appropriate ways in which to guard against them.
"Service level arrangements for example, can prove invaluable from the customer perspective in providing remedies which are proportionate to the types of system default which may occur. Whilst suppliers are often reluctant to provide service levels (and service credit arrangements for failure), it is certainly worth pursuing a robust service level arrangement. This is a sure way in which to add leverage to your position to ensure that issues are dealt with within agreed and appropriate timescales and with proportionate and pre-agreed remedies to apply in the relevant circumstances.
"Organisations should also consider whether business critical computer applications should be the subject of a separate disaster recover or "standby" service to be provided by an external party. These types of arrangement certainly come at a price but then so too does the damage to a business in the event of severe IT system default.
"Costs and benefits need to be balanced in considering whether to procure this kind of arrangement but businesses should assess the commercial risk of system failure, whether or not existing back up arrangements are sufficient and if not, where the weaknesses lie and take an objective view of whether the business could operate at least with an appropriate degree of efficiency without this kind of arrangement in place. The type of standby facility also needs to be very carefully considered. For example, businesses need to think about whether such facilities should be fixed standby (i.e. a remote standby facility) or a mobile standby (meaning that the recovery facility is brought to the customer site)."
2025
