Disaster Planning Base for Business Continuity
What are Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events—whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CIO's involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency.
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are now accepted as basics requirement for every business and organization. It is widely accepted that a detailed business continuity / disaster recovery plan should not only exist, but should be up to date. It should reflect the actual on-going needs of the business activity or function. But how do you ensure that this is actually the case?
If you have a plan, do you know that it will all work? Do you ever audit it, and if so, how? Equally importantly, do you know what your service/resource dependencies are and what their time criticalities are? What of your everyday contingency practices - do they measure up to close scrutiny?
Disaster Plan Necessary For Business Continuity Plan
Disaster Recovery Plans are part of a larger, more extensive planning process known as Business Continuity Planning. Disaster Recovery plans should be tested frequently so that the as many individuals as possible are familiar with the specific actions they will need to take when a disaster occurs. Disaster Recovery plans must also be adaptable and updated frequently, e.g. if new people, a new branch office, or new hardware or software are added to an organization they should promptly be incorporated into the organization's disaster recovery plan. Enterprises must consider all these facets of their organization as well as update and practice their plan if they want to maximize their recovery after a disaster.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are the process an organization uses to recover access to their enterprise operations; software, data, and/or hardware that are needed to resume the performance of normal, critical business functions after the event of either a natural disaster or a disaster caused by humans. While Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans (DRP & BCP) often focus on bridging the gap where data, software, or hardware have been damaged or lost, one cannot forget the vital element of work force that composes much of any organization. A building fire might predominantly affect vital data storage; whereas a pandemic or epidemic illness is more likely to have an effect on staffing. Both types of disaster need to be considered when creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. Thus, enterprises should include in their DRPs & BCPs contingencies for how they will cope with the sudden and/or unexpected loss of key personnel as well as how to recover their data.
Business Disruption Management
