Business continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Business continuity and Disaster recover are amongst the most unpleasant task of the business planning. They also offer some of the highest paybacks. Disaster planning is often neglected by the companies. It provides enormous business value and protects our assets. Too often when asked how they prepare for an emergency, companies will say that they backup their data every day. But, this is not enough. For example, it’s not uncommon for companies to back up their system and lock the backup tapes inside of fire retardant system. Fires are among the most common catastrophic disasters to affect businesses. But although these systems are fire proof, they won’t stop the backup tape from melting. In order to be effective, backups must be taken to an offsite location. Few statistics reveal that, 80% of the companies that suffer critical data loss will close their door within two years.

In addition to data protection, there are number of legal public relations, organizational and safety consideration which must be taken into account. In the chaos of an emergency, the broken window effect might come into play. Normally ethical employees might see an absence of authority and leadership as an opportunity for a fraud or theft. Every department in the company must contribute to the disaster plan. Disaster planning is a business issue, not an IT issue. IT department have the greatest insight into company-wide business process, so IT should be tasked with the disaster planning. But despite this a plan must be developed and implemented with top down support across all organizational departments. Without this insight and cross departmental participation, it is impossible to put together the proper plan.

The Disaster recovery plan stipulates, how a company will prepare for a disaster?  What the company response will be in the event of the disaster? And, What steps will it take to ensure that the operations will be restored? This plan must include many possible scenarios, since the causes of disaster can vary greatly. These can include things such as deliberate criminal activity, natural disaster such as fire, a stolen laptop, power outages, a terrorist attack, etc... There are hundreds of possible disaster scenarios and they vary based on cultural, geography and industry. It is also important that the disaster recovery plan be distributed across the organization so that everyone know the role within the plan.

The business continuity plan is a fairly new methodology that stipulates what steps a company must take to minimize the effects of service interruption. Back when companies were primarily paper-driven and information processing was done using batch processing, companies could tolerate a few days of downtime. But as technology became faster and cheaper, companies began computerizing more of their critical business activities. Companies needed to have systems in place that would minimize the impact of unplanned downtime. The first major event to demonstrate the importance of business continuity planning was the Y2K crisis. Since then, it’s been a standard function of corporate IT planning. One typical example of business continuity would be the electric generators used by hospitals to ensure that patients can still be cared for in the event of a power outage.

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfjWhAmWYL8