Hackers, hurricanes, fires, floods, power outages, denial of service attacks, application failures, employee errors, disruptions, and now terrorism are helping companies focus on business continuity planning.
In the late 1990s, as companies prepared for Y2K, many IT executives, risk managers, CFOs, and corporate executives realized that restoring computing systems, networks, and data was not enough. As Y2K approaches, it becomes even more obvious that a standardized approach is needed to recover data and systems, as well as to restore business processes, facilities and manpower to recover and maintain critical functions.
The starting point is a risk assessment. Identify and define your mission-critical business processes and systems. Check for vulnerabilities and determine the steps required for recovery and recovery. For your data, be sure to back it up to a safe and separate location. Evaluate a variety of storage solutions, including storage area networks, data replication systems, new virtualization systems, network attached storage devices, and managed storage. Pay special attention to your telecommunications provider to ensure that they have established diversity and redundancy in their networks and have developed well-developed and tested contingency plans.
The risk assessment will begin to raise real questions about business impacts and losses that may result from disruptions. Critical mission impacts, key business functions, processes and records must be identified. This is also the time to determine resource requirements and acceptable recovery time ranges.
Various recovery strategies should be evaluated to achieve your cost, reliability and recovery time. When evaluating alternatives, consider physical, technical, legal, regulatory, and personnel factors. Common failure points are lack of execution and budget support, but not full participation. In addition to your data, employees are your most valuable asset. An excellent list of "considerations for senior management during the crisis" is available at www.globalcontinuity.com [in the search box, enter the checklist and click on the DR&BC list].
Business continuity plans sound expensive and can be very time consuming. However, losing business functions, processes and systems, as well as company, customer and financial data can be disruptive. making plans. Train, test, train and test again.
Orignal From: Business continuity and disaster recovery - business is not a technical issue
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