We have all been in those meetings where we have had to explain to executives - ‘what happened?' Inevitably, the consensus of the post-disaster meeting is that ‘we need to do a better job protecting the business' and ‘draft proposals in a week'.  As you walk away, you play through your mind the various options you could investigate, vendors you could call, or web sites you could surf. You soon realize that you can propose anything but the reality is -what will the executives sign off on, what will they question, do they understand how vulnerable the business is, and will this be an endless game of back and forth?   How does one embark on a protection and recovery strategy? How does someone engage and obtain executive buy-in?

The real key to executive engagement is to move them from an awareness phase (‘Yes, we need to do a better job at this'.) to consideration phase (‘Wow, I did not know how vulnerable we are') as quickly as possible. The time to solidify strong support is early. We like to use a type of high-level vulnerability analysis which is a series of simple mathematical calculations - a revenue loss calculation and expenses incurred calculation. The beauty of these calculations is that they can be performed quickly, will work for any business type, and cannot be refuted. Additionally, it should be pointed out to the executive team that the variables in these initial calculations cannot be argued. This is strength of the calculation.

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