Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

When you own a business you should be prepared to face the risks associated with carrying on a business. It is very important that you understand the threats that are related to a business. But most of the times the budget comes into play. When looking for protecting the business you would have to look at

factors like the priorities, the time management etc. You are required to apply the cost benefit analysis to ensure that you are protecting the most important functions of the business.

The second step in protecting the business is to look at the probable threats and categorize them according to the priority.

The threats can basically be classified into a number of sections like:

• Man-made/natural

• Internal/external

• Accidental/intentional

• Primary/secondary

• Warning/no warning

• Controllable/non-controllable.

When you classify the threats for your business you should keep in mind that it is helpful in understanding the features of the threats, the impact that they would have on the business, and also the potential methods of controlling these threats.

Apart from this you are required to understand and recognize the mission critical business process and system. This is an important factor when building the business continuity plan. Once that you have established the probable threats to the business then you should identify the weaknesses and the potential loss that can occur as a result of these threats. This would require you to understand the weaknesses and the greatest impact that these can have on your business. This would start you to clarify the potential losses, which would further on help you to establish the priorities.

Once that you have identified and prioritized the threats and the weaknesses you should analyze the controls that are needed to help you protect your business. This would make you realize the physical security, the processes, data, communication, people and the assets that would require protection. Securities like data back up and physical securities are some of the obvious controls. There are some other controls that are lees obvious but they can be identified with the help of the risk evaluation process.

After you have understood the threats to the business and how would it affect the functioning then you should understand the probability of threats depending on the severity of the impact. This would require the business impact analysis, which would help you, establish the priorities for protection. When you do a business your goal should be to minimize the threats, the downtime and the impacts to reduce the losses. Your fundamental aim should be to protect the employees, data, all the important communication and the assets. Besides this you should also ensure that you business continues to function in a cost-effective way in accordance with the reasonable and careful judgment.

The business continuity plan is not just to protect the business from a disaster it should be there to protect your business from small threats like burglary or loss of data due to a fire breakout or due to power interruption etc. There are certain things that occur on a daily basis and can prevent the proper functioning of your company. You should be prepared for such things. The disaster recovery has always been associated with protecting the data and the computing system. However the disaster recovery is based on the after recovery on how quickly can everything be settled to carry on the business smoothly.

It is not a practical outlook that you can guard your business from any sort of disaster but with the help of proper risk analysis, documenting detailed recovery, business impact analysis, selecting effective strategies you would be able to reduce the significant risks in a cost effective way. When you consider business continuity and disaster recovery you are responsible for the management responsibility to safeguard the assets of the company. In the end of the last century as most of the companies were preparing themselves for Y2K most of them realized that just data recovery and recovering the computing networks was not enough. It was realized that a disciplined approach was required to not only recover the data but also to protect the business process, manpower and the facilities to ensure the proper continuity of the business.

To help your business function smoothly you are required to assess the risk in the beginning. With the help of risk assessment you will get to know the real questions that have an impact on the business. This would also help you in determining the resource requirements and the time that would be required for the recovery.

You should evaluate various recovery strategies so that you achieve the most cost-effective way of coming out of the disaster. The most common points are lack of budget and executive support. It is very important to realize that along with the data the employees are also a part of the company and a big asset. It is very important that you have some basic protection plans for physical protection. Business continuity can be an expensive and time-consuming ordeal. But you cannot afford to lose the companys functioning for any disaster. You should have a disaster recovery team that should be able to develop method to help the business continue despite and disaster. Remember that business continuity is as important as getting the right kind of finance.

You should train your staff and have additional back up for the computing systems so that you can easily recover even after a disaster.