Business continuity planning in the airport operating environment - where responsibility for essential functions is shared among airport departments and employees, contractors, tenants, federal agencies and fixed base operators (FBOs) - is challenging and complex.
Risk Solutions International's Airport Practice has developed a BCP software solution that is a first-of-its-kind tool to make resilience planning accessible to airports that do not have internal business continuity expertise or maturity. Our staff studied the airport sector through a project funded in part by the Federal Aviation Administration for the National Academy of Sciences through the Transportation Research Board's Airport Cooperative Research Program. The comprehensive 18 month research study included interviews and business impact assessments at 40 representative airports, as well as interviews with the federal agencies that operate at airports, industry associations and trade groups, and airlines, in order to document the level of the industry's knowledge and practice of operational resilience planning.
Research confirmed that - while airports excel at safety, security and emergency management - they are far less advanced in their understanding and implementation of business continuity planning and IT disaster recovery.
As an important sector of the U.S. critical national infrastructure, Risk Solutions International believes that airports should aggressively initiate business continuity planning so they gain confidence it the recovery of their mission-essential functions - which are critical to the local and regional economies that they support and serve. Risk Solutions International also believes that airports should be encouraged by their state and federal regulators to develop a sustained internal capacity for operational recovering - as a matter of national economic security.
In the current absence of regulatory mandates, Risk Solutions International developed a comprehensive guidebook - Operational and Business Continuity Planning for Prolonged Airport Disruptions - published by the Transportation Research Board in November 2013. The guidebook and an accompanying software tool are available from the Transportation Research Board at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/acrp/acrp_rpt_093.pdf.
The software was designed and developed as an "intelligent" tool that dynamically navigates users - from all sizes and types of airports - through a conditionally-presented survey that only ask questions about the essential functions that are operational at each individual airport. The tool then generates a business continuity plan in a dynamically-generated on-screen HTML format, then converts it - in real time - into a finished product as a fully paginated PDF document specific to each airport's unique operating circumstances.
Risk Solutions International expects this software and guidebook will prove to be a valuable resource to help airports move to the "next level" in their continuity planning. The company's business continuity experts are available to those airport operators that want assistance in implementing their business continuity plans. The powerful software tool, along with support from Risk Solutions International's BCP consultants in implementing it, will help airports comply with accepted business continuity standards and practices - whether they are large, medium or small hubs or non-hubs, or commercial service, general aviation or reliever airports.
Download the Operational and Business Continuity Planning for Prolonged Airport Disruptions
For More Information
For additional information on Risk Solutions International's resources and capabilities in the Airport sector, please contact Scott Corzine at contact@rsi-llc.com.