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0:00
Hi.
My name's Scott Baldwin.
And I'm the head of
business continuity at eBay.
Today, I'm going to talk about
BC planning across a matrix.
0:10
So first, let me tell you
a little bit about eBay.
eBay started in 1995
as an online auction site.
Today, it's grown to be the largest
marketplace in the world.
We have a large global footprint
with offices in over 40 countries.
We have over 35,000 full-time
employees and tens of thousands
of part-time and contract
employees, as well.
Most importantly to me, eBay supports
millions of people who depend on us
in some way for their livelihood.
0:43
So now let's talk about
business continuity.
Business continuity is
simply the discipline
of preparing for and recovering
from a business-disrupting event.
Now, this can be anything
from a technical outage
to a natural disaster
to a terrorist attack.
Anything that disrupts the normal
flow of business operations
can be considered a
business continuity event.
1:08
So one of the primary
deliverables that a business
continuity program provides is
called a business continuity plan.
And a business continuity plan
is simply a set of instructions that
is designed to help
a specific department
recover from a disruption
by pointing out
specific tasks and recovery steps.
1:32
Like many medium and
large-size companies,
eBay has adopted a centralized
business continuity model.
This means that a relatively
small group of business continuity
professionals in the corporate
level are responsible for ensuring
that each department in the whole
company has a resiliency plan
and is prepared for a disruption.
Because there are thousands of
departments and only a few of us,
it's actually physically
impossible for the corporate group
to create, maintain, manage,
and test all of these plans.
Therefore, we have requested and
required that each department
identify and provide
someone from their own group
to maintain and test their plans.
Also because in the business
continuity corporate group,
we're obviously not experts
in every area of the business,
it really doesn't make sense
for us to be the ones to create
recovery plans for the business.
It's important to realize that these department-level planners are
not business continuity experts.
They have a regular
day job that have
been doing for years, sometimes
that they've chosen to do.
So business continuity planning is
a responsibility that's given to them
on top of their regular work.
