Experts Agree You Should Update Your Plan Annually

It goes without saying that every company, regardless of size, needs a concise business continuity plan in case of an emergency. If you don't have a disaster recovery plan or haven't updated yours recently, now is the time to take this critical step to protect your business.

At the same time there are more security requirements that need to be met.  Executive management is depending on you to have the right security policies and procedures in place.

Chief Information Officers and Chief Security Officers need to have DRP and Security policies and procedures in place that address all of the issues of management and these templates meet this need.

Disaster Planning Business Continity News

 

Below are the top 5 stories from the Active News Feeds created by Janco Associates for issues on disaster planning and business continuity

 

Disaster Planning Business Continuity News

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Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

In December 2010 Google launched Message Continuity, a new cloud-based disaster recovery and  business continuity service for Microsoft Exchange. A year later, Google has announced the end of that service, leaving many organizations with the task of finding an alternative Microsoft Exchange business continuity service.

While the vendor said that existing contracts will continue to be serviced until their renewal date, for some early adopters of this service will only have a few weeks, or even days, to find an alternative solution.

This raises a warning flag about the wisdom of relying on the public cloud companies for any services which may be critical to your day-to-day activities; or for business continuity.

The cloud brings many new solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity: but buyer beware has never been more crucial. Service level agreements only apply if your supplier is in business; and there is certainly no requirement for suppliers to provide any support or service once a contract expires.

After this termination of service can you trust Google or any other vendor to host a mission-critical service?

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Core disaster recovery planning questions

Whether your business is a one-man operation or it employs a thousand people, the starting point is the same: identify the processes critical to your success. To do this, you should first define what critical means in your business. Rank each process according to that definition, and then ask how long can your business survive without it, who performs it, and what IT resources support it.

Questions you can ask:

• Can you simply not survive without this process? This should be your primary priority. Your business continuity plan must protect all primary priorities when a disaster strikes.
• Can you survive only a day or two without it? This should be a secondary priority. Your business continuity plan should address all secondary priorities after primary priorities are handled.
• Can you survive a week or more without it? Add it to your list of low priorities.

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Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption

BS 25999 defines the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) as :the duration after which an organization's viability will be irreparably damaged if delivery of a particular product or service cannot be resumed". It advises companies to "…assess over time the impacts… if the activity is disrupted" and "…establish the MTPD of each activity". It instructs us to identify the latest time by which an activity must be resumed, establish the minimum level to which resumption must be achieved, and set the time within which normal activity levels must be restored. It says companies should "…identify any inter-dependent activities, assets, supporting infrastructure or resources that also have to be maintained"

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Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning

Most people who are involved in emergency management are aware of the four primary phases of emergency management: prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

Recovery includes short-term measures taken to restore essential functions and systems, as well as longer-term activities intended to facilitate a return to pre-emergency conditions, or ideally to improve conditions through mitigation measures.

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Importance of data recovery for mid-sized companies

Identifying the right tools for data recovery in the disaster recovery and business continuity processes is extremely important to the success and continuity of middle‐sized organizations. These tools need to be integrated without requiring an expensive and disruptive overhaul of existing IT infrastructure, and without adding to or demanding more of IT staff.

One key to this is to build on existing data storage and protection equipment. Tape is the best option when expanding on existing processes, because tape is a medium that is affordable.

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