Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
by Virginia Kramer, Director of Unified Communications and Operations Services

Each year our IT infrastructures become increasingly critical to the daily operations of an organization.  Failure of a single component or catastrophic scenarios can be crippling, and if there are no contingency plans, they can destroy the business beyond repair.

We do not like to dwell on the negative and oftentimes feel it is a waste of time to plan for disasters, but a disaster can be something we would not necessarily think of as a “catastrophe.”   A disruption in business service could be caused by an equipment failure on a server that supports a critical business application, or a breakdown in a critical communication process.    Creating a Business Continuity (BC) and/or Disaster Recovery (DR) plan prepares a company with a process for keeping the organization operational after a disruptive event until normal facilities are restored. 

These plans need to encompass how employees will communicate, if relocation is required and where that will be, what the key systems are that need to be restored, and timeframes and process for restoration.  The details of the plan will be dependent upon each company’s Business Impact Analysis findings, which identifies the business’ most critical systems and the impacts that an outage will have on the business.  

For a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) plan to be effective, the company must include testing of the plan.  This testing may be quarterly, semi-annual or annual depending on the business needs.  In addition to testing and validating your BC/DR plan, it must be maintained.  No business environment today is completely static; therefore, it is important to continually update the plan as environment and business needs change.

In time of crisis, no matter how big or small, a solid BCP/DR plan can have a significant impact on business economics and public perception.