Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - A Business Not a Technology Issue

Hackers, hurricanes, fires, flooding, power outages, denial of service attacks, application failures, employee error, sabotage and now terrorism are helping companies to focus on the necessity of a business continuity plan.

Through the late 1990s as companies prepared for Y2K, many IT executives, risk managers, CFOs and corporate managers realized that recovering computing systems, networks and data was not enough. As Y2K approached, it became more apparent that a disciplined approach was needed to recover not only data and systems, but also business processes, facilities and manpower to restore and maintain critical functions.

The starting point is a risk assessment. Identify and define your mission critical business processes and systems. Review them for vulnerabilities and identify steps required for restoration and recovery. For your data, make sure it is backed up to secure and separate locations. Evaluate various storage solutions including storage area networks, data replication systems, new virtualization systems, network attached storage devices and managed storage. Pay significant attention also to your telecommunications providers to ensure they have built diversity and redundancy into their networks and have well developed and tested contingency plans.

The risk assessment will start to drive out real questions on the business impacts and losses that could result from disruptions. Mission critical impacts, key business functions, processes and records must all be identified. This is also the time to determine resource requirements and acceptable recovery time frames.

Various recovery strategies should be evaluated to achieve your cost, reliability and time to recover objectives. Include physical, technological, legal, regulatory and personnel considerations when you evaluate alternatives. Common points of failure are a lack of executive and budget support and not fully engaging employees. Along with your data, employees are your most valuable asset. An excellent checklist "Considerations for senior management during a time of crisis" is at www.globalcontinuity.com (enter checklists in the search box, click on DR & BC checklists).

Business continuity planning sounds expensive and it can be time-consuming. However, losing your business functions, processes and systems as well as your company, customer and financial data can be devastating. Build your plan. Train, test, train and test again.

About The Author

Robert Mahood has significant technology and management experience in data communications, internet, storage, disaster recovery and data recovery. He is currently the president of Midwest Data Recovery. www.midwestdatarecovery.com

bmahood@midwestdatarecovery.com, 866 786 2595 or 312 907 2100

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Data Recovery Information:

Related Articles

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Reducing Your Risk Profile
Like all plans, there is an ultimate goal to achieve. The goal in a business continuity plan is simply that: to continue your business in the face of a disaster or a disruption.
Do You Have The One Key Ingredient Necessary For Disaster Recovery?
It is not rocket science, we all know that we should have a disaster recovery plan in place for our business regardless of its size. When disaster strikes, it seldom discriminates on the size of the company.
Data Recovery The Easy Way
If you aren't prepared in advance, you will most likely have to use a data recovery service or data recovery software solution to help get back as much as you can of what was lost. This can be a very good idea if there is no other way to recover your files, but it doesn't have to come to that in most cases.
Avoiding Hard Disk Data Recovery Services
As a home computer owner, one of the greatest threats to yourinformation and to your wallet, is hard disk failure. When yourdrive crashes, you will quicky realize how valuable theinformation you can no longer access is.
Computer Data Recovery Options
Losing files on your computer can be a frightening experience if the files are of importance to you personally or professionally. Computer data recovery techniques include the most simple of operations, like simply retrieving an accidentally deleted file, to very complex file retrieval procedures that only professionals should attempt to do.
Data Recovery
Every person who uses a personal computer will eventually face the challenge of data recovery. Computer hardware and software can be temperamental from time to time.
Backing Up Personal Computers
Backup on business computers is typically not the user's concern unless it's a small business. A business should have a policy in place for managing backups especially due to Sarbanes - Oxyley.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Risk Analysis and Control
In the risk evaluation phase, there are a number of key areas that must be covered. One of the most important is to understand probable threats.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Business Impact Analysis
Business impact analysis is a critical part of the business continuity planning process. This step quantifies data and gets into the real world issue of potential losses that can negatively impact your business.
The Best Data Recovery Choice For You
The best defense against a loss of data is a really solid and faithful backup routine of important files to reliable media. It's also a good idea for the media to be removable and portable if possible so that even if something happens to your whole computer for any reason, the data is protected by being in a totally different physical area.
Is Your Backup Good Enough?
As someone who has seen quite a few hard drive crashes over the years, I believe that performing a full backup of your computer's hard drive should be an important part of your weekly (if not daily) routine. There's nothing more frustrating & costly than trying to restore a computer with only a handful of Floppy disk drives, a couple of scratched CD-ROMs or poorly stored backup tapes.
The Seven Golden Rules Of Data Backups
Backups of company data are carried out for two main reasons. The first is to cater for those times when a document is inadvertently deleted or damaged and you wish to recover the original document; the second is as part of a disaster recovery plan in case something catastrophic happens to your computers (e.
I Lost It! Simple Guide To Recovering Corrupted Images And Files
WinUndeletehttp://www.deprice.
Online Data Backups for Newbies
How long have you been doing business online? Whether you are new or an old timer you need to understand the one important truth of the e-world. That being that the largest threat to business survival is data loss.
Data Recovery - What Not to Do!
Data recovery is a tricky thing, and if you've somehowdeleted or had your important files corrupted or lost due tohuman error, business espionage, faulty hardware or softwareor any other reason; the good news is that your lost datais probably recoverable. This article will show you a fewthings NOT to do when an event such as this occurs.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - A Business Not a Technology Issue
Hackers, hurricanes, fires, flooding, power outages, denial of service attacks, application failures, employee error, sabotage and now terrorism are helping companies to focus on the necessity of a business continuity plan.Through the late 1990s as companies prepared for Y2K, many IT executives, risk managers, CFOs and corporate managers realized that recovering computing systems, networks and data was not enough.
The Importance Of Email Backup
Viruses, software failures, power failures, human errors, hard drive failures are only a few examples of what could destroy the data on a hard drive, including all documents, pictures, emails and other files!Most home computer users don't need an expensive backup solution; as they only need to burn the folders with important documents and pictures to a CD-RW from time to time; this ensuring that in case of a disaster they can easily get them back. Togeder with documents and pictures, it's a critical operation to save the emails, attachments, address book and other important data from within the email client; otherwise in case of a computer problem the user will find himself in the impossibility to get them back, and this can be a really unwanted situation especially for webmasters or people who rely on their emails.
Bill Gates Made Data Recovery Easy
Bill gates provided a ready made option in Microsoft windows, which is very useful for data recovery.Several time we make mistakes unknowingly and we lost our data, then we need to recover the data.
3 Simple Steps To Organize Your Critical Online Home Based Business Directory
If You are running an Online Work at home Business it is very critical that you create a well organized directory structure. The Obvious advantage of an organized Directory structure is it makes it easy to find what you need.
Hard Drive Crash? The Essential Data Recovery Report
Your worst nightmare just became a horrifying reality. You keep hearing that little voice in your head mockingly shout "you should have backed that stuff up" The voice keeps echoing throughout your head as you perform a quick inventory all of the important information that you just lost?.