Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning Is Significant

With increasing natural disaster conditions around the world, the significance of business continuity and disaster recovery planning is becoming more obvious. The senior executives and management team are aware that if systems are unavailable, financial losses start occurring within an hour and business reputation plummets quickly. 

The fact is that business continuity problems do not arise daily, but it is vital to be prepared for probable disaster in advance.

Business continuity (BC) versus disaster recovery (DR)

BC and DR are normally used synonymously. The fact is that they are related, but function differently within your organization.

Business Continuity – This process is involved in managing the exposure to external and internal threats, which can disturb the accessibility of your company’s business activities. It includes the management control, risk management steps and documentation of planned-processes to maintain business during business disruption.

Disaster Recovery – Basically, it is a sub-division of BC program and is known to maintain the IT section including the non-technology assets too. The focus is recovery around employees, procedures and technologies included in vital phase of business functions during disastrous events. 

Senior management sanction and supervision is the vital function to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan successfully. 

Steps included in business continuity and disaster recovery planning is:

• Creating framework (Mission, objectives, outline structure of team, committee and technology recovery plans)
• Regularly assess risks to detect probable threats and vulnerabilities (analyze potential downtime losses and recovery points)
• Regular updating, training and testing to optimize reaction is necessary

Significance of DR plans

Records of business and technology reaction, recovery and restoration processes for every department is utterly important. Plan coordinator outlines the recovery procedures including a role based team and incident checklist with details. Planner is also responsible to share and store the plan. Hard copy and softcopy of your business continuity and recovery plan must be stored at the main operating site as well as at an off-site location.