By: Sylene Argent, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Essex Free Press
During the development of the Town of Essex’s IT Strategic Plan, the need for a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and Business Impact Assessment was identified as a key priority.
Members of Council were presented with, and received, the Business Impact Assessment Report and BCP during the October 19 meeting.
Jack Barron, Manager of Information Technologies, said Town of Essex staff have been working closely with Gary Walker from Perry Group Consulting on a comprehensive business plan, which identifies critical services, recovery priorities, and manual workarounds when there is a service disruption.
His report adds that a BCP is intended to ensure the Town can maintain or promptly restore essential core services—such as water and wastewater operations, fire and emergency response, public works, information technology, finance,
and customer service— following a significant service disruption. The plan establishes clear roles and responsibilities, identifies critical services and dependencies, and defines recovery priorities to support the continued delivery of services to the community.
In walking members of Council through the plans, Walker went over the importance of structured planning. He believes it is fantastic that the Town moved forward with putting together the Business Continuity Plan.
“We made some great progress in putting this Business Continuity Plan together,” Walker said.
The BCP identified potential threats and vulnerabilities that could impact the critical services the Town delivers, in addition to proactive measures to reduce impact.
“The Business Continuity Plan really provides just a clear framework of procedures to continue to deliver these services in the event of an unplanned disruption,” he noted, adding even large and small municipalities are all vulnerable to these types of disruptions.
Those disruptions are not just about cyber security; there are other issues that could be realized as well. There could be a loss of staff or technologies for a variety of reasons.
“The Town has made some great strides putting this together,” Walker said.
In 2026, Walker noted a lot of work was completed on the Business Continuity Plan. There was a collaborative effort between his consulting firm and Town of Essex departments and the IT Department.
Together, they performed a Business Impact Assessment for 15 business units throughout the organization. All the critical services were defined, as well as the recovery time objectives. There were 80 services identified.
Business units are divided up into the town’s departments, which sometimes are further divided depending on the services they provide.
In addition, through the project, a Corporate Business Continuity Plan strategy was developed, and an IT application/service catalogue was built to support the organization’s reliance on technology.
The firm also conducted validation sessions with the business units to ensure the recovery objective times were aligned with their various services and functions.
The plan also provided full access to departmental leads, so they can manage the continuity plans. That, Walker said, is going to allow the Town to easily manage these plans.
One of the key issues organizations of all sizes have with Business Continuity Plans is keeping the plans current.
“The only thing worse than no plan is an outdated plan,” Walker warned. “It is very, very important that the town keeps moving along with this business continuity program.”
As it is a program, he said annual funding needs to be available to ensure the plans are up to date.
Work includes continuing to validate Department BCPs with the business units, conduct additional training sessions as required, schedule annual BCP validation sessions, schedule annual tabletop exercises, and schedule annual functionality testing for IT systems.
In answering Deputy Mayor Rob Shepley if an annual emergency preparedness test should be held to see how the system operates or what kind of updates and changes are needed, Walker responded that nearly all municipalities they work with have a fairly mature emergency management process. They basically cover life safety. Business continuity can work together with the emergency management process. Emergency preparedness testing can be dovetailed in with business continuity programs.
In answering Councillor Katie McGuire-Blais on whether there is any hardware or software the Town should have as a backup plan to support itself in the event of an emergency in getting back up and running, Director of Corporate Services, Kate Rowe, said it is believed the Town has the necessary backups. This plan is for service delivery.
As the Town makes its way through and continues to review this program on an annual basis, any recommendations brought forward would come to Council during the budget cycle. Council, she said, would have to go through the budget process and identify the level of risk it is comfortable taking on, considering the dollar impact of those decisions.