Though it’s difficult to plan for everything, some level of preparedness is better than none at all. A good disaster recovery plan is the equivalent of an information insurance plan for your business.
What do terms like “disaster recovery” and “business continuity” mean?
· Business Continuance is more people-centric and focuses on providing critical business functions to customers in the event of a disaster.
What key disaster recovery questions do you need to answer?
1. How much data can you lose and still be in business?
a. This answer will determine your technology action plans.
b. According to Gartner, two out of five businesses that experience a catastrophic event or prolonged outage never resume operations. Planning is key.
2. How quickly can you get up and running?
a. If you don’t have a remote backup of your server, it could be weeks and even months.
b. If an online presence is critical to your business, the sooner you get back online the better. These types of businesses typically maintain a continuous disaster recovery “warm site” that allows them to be back online within minutes. This service is expensive but, if your business is dependent on online transactions, invaluable.
Though long-range goals like risk-assessment and business impact analysis should be considered, it’s more important to have a plan for keeping your doors open.
A business continuity plan identifies not only who is going to answer the phone, but also where that phone will be located.
What sorts of questions comprise this first stage of planning?
· Phones – if you have an 800 number, you will want to add the contact information for that number to your prep list and have a plan in place to move that number quickly.
· Office location – you might be lucky enough to have another location already for your displaced employees to camp out. If not, you might explore other options such as using a mobile office unit. Our recovery service provides this as part of their package.
· Computers, printers and faxes – a current list of the types of equipment and PC’s is essential so you are guaranteed that your software will work on your replacement machines.
· Network connection – a satellite dish at the recovery site, along with cables, routers and modems should more than meet your needs.
· Power generators and starter fuel in case the power is knocked out for your entire community
· Technical support – this might be from your remote site or from a vendor you set up in advance.
· A plan to return to your site (or not) – Whether it’s the removal of your mobile site or the setup of a new office location, it’s important to have a plan to resume your business operations at the completion of a disastrous event.
Here is a link to a site with some free templates to help you in your disaster recovery and business continuity planning. You might also meet with your IT team to see what contingencies they are prepared for. ReadyOC has a great checklist focusing on Orange County while Ready Business is a little more global. All of these functions can also be outsourced quite easily – BCWS uses Agility Recovery Solutions.
What sorts of disaster preparedness techniques have you found the most helpful? Have you ever had to recover from a severe business outage?
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