Bracing for zero day [Y2K management]

Your Y2K efforts focus on one goal: ensuring business continuity. Implement the right zero-day strategies to clinch the compliance race. Business continuity planning evolved from contingency planning, which looks at your business operations, imagines what could go wrong, and develops measures for dealing with those emergencies. Ultimately, contingency planning is shortsighted because it focuses on reacting to problems that you could possibly avoid altogether. Further, contingency plans only indirectly address your ultimate goal: ensuring that your business continues to function under any circumstances. By focusing on continuity instead, you work to ensure that events such as power interruptions, vendor dropouts, and systems crashes don´t significantly impede your daily operations. If that´s not possible, a good continuity plan can still ensure that your operations degrade gracefully. For Y2K, a comprehensive business continuity plan should consist of three components: (i) contingency planning guards against possible failures by putting in place appropriate prevention and mitigation measures; (ii) event management defines the measures to deal with unexpected occurrences like system malfunctions or business problems that arise from computer or software failures; (iii) zero-day strategies are the special actions you take immediately preceding and following the Y2K transition. The author presents guidelines on how to implement these planning strategies