Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning
What's a Disaster Recovery
Plan?
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) — often referred to
synonymously as a business continuity plan (BCP) — is a
comprehensive set of measures and procedures put into place within
an organisation to ensure that essential, mission critical
resources and infrastructures are maintained or backed up by
alternatives during various stages of a disaster.
A
DRP must address three areas:
- Prevention (pre-disaster): The pre-planning
required — using mirrored servers for mission critical
systems, maintaining hot sites, training disaster recovery
personnel — to minimise the overall impact of a disaster on
systems and resources. This pre-planning also maximises the ability
of an organisation to recover from a disaster.
- Continuity (during a disaster): The process of
maintaining core, mission-critical systems and resource "skeletons"
(the bare minimum assets required to keep an organisation in
operational status) and/or initiating secondary hot sites during a
disaster. Continuity measures prevent the whole organisation from
folding by preserving essential systems and resources.
- Recovery (post-disaster): The steps required
for the restoration of all systems and resources to full, normal
operational status. Organisations can cut down on recovery time by
subscribing to quick-ship.
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning, however,
involves more than just a series of technology-based system
recovery procedures. A DRP needs to include contingencies for the
loss of:
- IT infrastructure: Network, Internet access,
data and application servers.
- Building facilities: Primary power sources,
water, heating.
- Communications: E-mail, landline telephone,
cell phones.
- Personnel: Key personnel required to take
action during a crisis.
The Objectives of Disaster Recovery
Plans
A DRP is an insurance policy. It enables an organisation to
respond efficiently to potential threats that may render all or
parts of its operations and resources unavailable
DRP protect an organisation in many ways:
- Provides a greater sense of security.
- Ensures a certain level of system and resource stability during
a disaster.
- Minimises system downtime and recovery time.
- Minimises the risk of permanent loss of core assets or the
entire organisation.
- Minimises confusion during a disaster.
- Minimises the amount of decision-making during a high-stress
time when emotions will be running high.
- Provides a platform in which to simulate various disaster
recovery scenarios.
- Ensures the reliability of secondary systems such as hot sites
and server mirrors.
In general, smaller operations that don't provide any essential
services may find it cost ineffective, or even unnecessary, to
implement a full-scale DRP beyond keeping off-site backups and
maintaining a basic set of server power down procedures. Larger
enterprises with mission critical data and systems, however, must
consider a more extensive solution in order to prevent a total
collapse and cessation of operations.
But DRP necessity — as well as the size and scale of the
DRP — really depends on the purpose of the organisation and
the importance of business continuity during a disaster.
To make an enquiry about our Disaster Recovery
Services, please:
