Part 2 will discuss the Importance of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Importance of Business Continuity

Business continuity is a company’s ability for maintaining essential functions when a disaster occurs. Planning business continuity involves establishing risk management processes and procedures designed to prevent disruptions to critical services and fully restore functions as rapidly and efficiently as possible.

Minimum basic business continuity requirements are recovering and maintaining essential functions while minimizing downtime. A solid plan will consider a variety of unpredictable events, including cyberattacks, manmade and natural disasters, pandemics, and other threats.

In the event of a disaster, businesses of every size will need a way to maintain business continuity. However, only the biggest companies may be able to maintain every function for the entire period of a disaster. Experts recommend that an organization first determines its essential functions, budget accordingly, and implement failover mechanisms.

Disk mirroring and other technical processes will allow a business to maintain the newest copies of data files in both its main data center and geographically dispersed locations. This allows for uninterrupted data access in the event that one location becomes disabled, while preventing data loss.

Disaster Recovery Planning

The development of a sound disaster recovery (DR) plan will require weighing several factors, which will help ensure a DR solution will perform as needed should an unforeseen event occur.

Disaster recovery will only be possible with good planning. Typically, a DR plan runs about 100 pages, and your team will need to consult with backup and disaster recovery experts. We will discuss the basic and essential items a disaster recovery plan should contain in a later discussion.

Part 3 will cover Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), DR Plan & Testing, and Managed Backup Service for Disaster Recovery.

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