What ensure that essential business functions are available during and after disaster?
Disaster Recovery – Vital For Business Continuity PlanningDisaster Recovery (DR) is a procedure or a process to resume business after an unexpected disruptive event. The disruptive event can be a natural catastrophe, terrorist attack, mechanical errors, human driven errors or due to computer malware. Disaster recovery is a division of business continuity planning. Show
In order to achieve Business Continuity, a plan is devised with a comprehensive approach by an organization to ensure that important business functions will be accessible to customers, suppliers, regulators and other entities during a disaster. The essential business continuity functions may include maintaining consistency in service, help desk and other project management related functions such as recoverability. The concept of disaster recovery was developed from 1970s when most of the enterprise managers factually discovered the dependency of their organizations on computer systems. As a result, the concept of providing backup computer centers by Sun Information Systems was started. As the awareness for IT disaster recovery grew in between the years 1980s to 1990s, the disaster recovery industry started to grow rapidly, as many organizations started to understand the benefits offered by this technology. Moreover, government laws were issued to mandate disaster recovery and business continuity plans for organizations in different sectors of the economy. As Internet growth took place in late 90s and perpetuated into 2000s, this made organizations become further dependent on continuous availability of IT systems for their mission critical application needs. This increased the dependency on IT systems and also increased the awareness about large scale disasters and thus contributed for further growth of vendors providing DR solutions ranging from high availability solutions to hot-site facilities. Categorization of Disaster Disasters are of two types, as the first category is when a natural disaster take place like floods, earthquake….and the second category is when a disaster is man made disaster. Preventing occurrence of natural disasters is almost impossible, but measures such as good planning to reduce or avoid losses can be taken up to overcome it. The man made disasters which can be caused by infrastructure failure, hazardous material spills or cyber-war by terrorists. To prevent this situation, surveillance along with mitigation planning will be the best tools to avoid or reduce the losses to the business. Significance of Disaster Recovery Planning Every enterprise treats its IT infrastructure as critical and wants its business functions to be consistently functional and be highly available with the presence of a rapid disaster recovery plan. For this reason, preparation for business continuation has to be taken seriously. It involves monetary investments and time and is an arrangement to ensure minimal loss during disaster driven disruption. Strategies employed for Disaster Recovery Planning During a Disaster Recovery planning, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery time objective (RTO) should be taken into consideration. A recovery point objective (RPO) is defined as a maximum acceptable period for data loss from an IT service due to a disaster. While a recovery time objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which the IT service pertaining to a business service restoration. Some of the common strategies employed for data protection are tape backups taken at regular intervals, disk backups taken automatically, replication of data to an off-site location, cloud based backup, use of high availability systems which keep the data and system replicated off-site and other such strategies which paves way for availability of data even after disaster. In addition to prepare for a disaster with a business continuity plan, an enterprise needs to implement precautionary measures like local mirroring of systems or data with RAID technology, use of uninterruptible power supply sources, use of power surge protectors, by planning for fire prevention/mitigation systems such as fire alarms and fire extinguishers and finally planning for security measures like using an antivirus software. In today’s ever-evolving business landscape where there’s zero tolerance for downtime, a simple human error, a cyberattack or natural disaster could bring your business to a standstill. Having a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) response plan is key to business resilience and for the survival of your organization. What Is BCDR?Techopedia defines BCDR as a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. It is a broad term that combines the roles and functions of IT and business in the aftermath of a disaster. BCDR enables organizations to adapt to and bounce back from disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations. What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?The term “business continuity and disaster recovery” is a fusion of two components — business continuity and disaster recovery. BC and DR plans are designed to bring things back to normal in the event of a disaster or a catastrophe. Although they complement each other, they are not the same and their functions are different. While a business continuity plan is a company-wide strategic planning, disaster recovery is mainly IT-focused. Business continuity: According to the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) and Business Continuity Institute (BCI), business continuity is “the strategic and tactical capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and business disruptions in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level.” A business continuity plan focuses on how an organization maintains critical business operations during and after a disaster. This plan includes every aspect of an organization: its employees, communication channel, office building, IT infrastructure, business partners, etc. It comprises specific actions and pre-determined responsibilities that must be taken when disaster strikes. Disaster recovery: DR is part of a business continuity plan. The DRJ and BCI define disaster recovery as “the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure, systems and applications, which are vital to an organization after a disaster or outage.” A disaster recovery plan concerns with restoration of important IT applications and data after a catastrophe. DR focuses on minimizing downtime as well as the impact of a disaster by ensuring vital support systems are up and running as quickly as possible with minimal loss of data. How Are Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Connected?Business continuity and disaster recovery are essential aspects of an organization’s overall risk management strategy. Having a business continuity strategy without a disaster recovery plan would be ineffective, and disaster recovery alone does not ensure business continuity. Both BC and DR plans need to work together to mitigate the business impact of a potential disaster. A good business continuity plan ensures that business-critical functions are unhindered when disaster strikes and requires a disaster recovery plan that ensures all IT systems, software and applications are accessible and recoverable. Both business continuity and disaster recovery are equally important since they provide specific procedures and strategies on how a business will resume after a crisis. What Is a BCDR Plan?A business continuity and disaster recovery plan is a combination of strategies, policies and procedures about how an organization should respond to or adapt to potential threats or unforeseen disruptive events while minimizing the negative impacts. A BCDR plan should account for a variety of scenarios — from accidental deletions and hardware failure to malware attacks and natural disasters. It helps ensure that routine tasks continue smoothly with minimal or no downtime, or data loss following a disaster. A BCDR plan encompasses what steps should be taken to ensure vital business processes are uninterrupted and how to quickly restore IT systems and data to resume business after a disruptive event. Goals of BCDR PlanningThe fundamental goal of BCDR planning is not only to provide data recovery but also to minimize the effects of a crisis on business operations and enable an organization to get back to normal quickly in the aftermath of a disaster. Listed below are five goals that you can use to fortify your BCDR plans.
Why Is It Important for an Organization to Have a BCDR Plan?A business continuity and disaster recovery plan helps organizations prepare for potentially disruptive events. It enhances an organization’s ability to continue business operations with little or no disruption and minimizes the risk in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. Organizations without a BCDR plan cannot survive or recover from a major disaster. In fact, the effects of large-scale disasters can shut down operations. More than 90 percent of companies without a DR plan that suffer a major disaster are out of business within 12 months. A BCDR plan is like an insurance policy for an organization. BCDR programs help an organization to reduce overall risk, get back up and running after an outage or disruption, mitigate the risk of data loss and protect against reputational damage. Improve Your Business Resilience with UnitrendsFor companies, being able to effectively tackle any disaster can have a positive impact on customers and partners. However, developing a comprehensive BCDR strategy can be a challenge due to its complex nature or lack of in-house expertise. Unitrends can help your organization achieve resiliency and prepare for unforeseen disruptive events. Unitrends increases uptime, productivity and confidence, enabling you to do more with less. Our all-in-one backup appliances simplify data protection, application spin-up and SLA policy, and integrate seamlessly with the cloud, thereby delivering long-term retention and fast disaster recovery. To learn how you can minimize downtime and maximize productivity, register for a demo today. How does disaster recovery planning ensure business continuity?It helps ensure that routine tasks continue smoothly with minimal or no downtime, or data loss following a disaster. A BCDR plan encompasses what steps should be taken to ensure vital business processes are uninterrupted and how to quickly restore IT systems and data to resume business after a disruptive event.
What is the system used to make sure a business recovers after a major disaster?A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented, structured approach that describes how an organization can quickly resume work after an unplanned incident. A DRP is an essential part of a business continuity plan (BCP).
How can you ensure the continuity of your business?Use Downtime Prevention Solutions
As such, among the best ways to ensure business continuity is to implement an effective backup and disaster recovery solution. That way, if your IT network has an issue—whether it's a ransomware attack or hardware failure—you can keep these critical systems up and running.
How is business and disaster recovery connected?A disaster recovery plan acts as a safeguard and protects businesses from unpredicted circumstances. A business continuity plan aims at streamlining the flow of operations or processes after any damage or disaster.
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