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The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Challenge
The purpose of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning is planning for in-operability of your computer systems and/or inaccessibility to your office. The impacts of a disaster are tremendous. They include, temporary and permanent loss of revenues (customers, business opportunity, market share, competitive edge, customer confidence, etc.), violation of regulatory requirements, legal liabilities, personnel safety, damages to personnel morale, expense of personnel downtime, embarrassment of not being prepared, etc. There are numerous events, which can cause a disaster. Fire, flood, power outage, terrorism, and more than 200 other documented events that have caused disasters. Your obligations come from corporate survival, auditing compliance, insurance requirements, legislation and regulatory requirements, and due diligence.
Services Provided
Business Impact Analysis
Reviewing your company’s risk should a disaster occur is the first step to preparedness. The business impact analysis generates a report on what you should do to prepare for different disasters.
Disaster Awareness Training
Establishes management and staff disaster awareness programs.
Vital Records Programs
Review and establishes mission critical data backup programs to increase recoverability. Review your business to determine what non-technology data needs to be protected in case of a disaster. This could include paper files, company assets, art collections, government required papers, employee records, etc.
Disaster Planning
Based on the Impact Analysis, the next step is to produce a detailed plan to guide your company's response and survival should different disasters occur.
Risk Assessment
With your Business Plan and Contingency Plan in place, risk assessment is applied to determine the cost impact of different potential disasters. This assessment will help determine if the Contingency Plan needs to be modified to better protect your company.
Preparedness Audit
Once a Contingency Plan is in place, it must be reviewed periodically to see if modifications to the plan are needed due to changes in your business.
Standby Recovery Support
Providing standby recovery support for maintenance, and actual emergencies and disasters.
Summary
Disaster and Contingency Plans are requirements for business today. The realistic choices that well prepared companies have are the level of detail in the plan and how in depth they want the plan to protect their company. With management looking at all projects with an eye toward the bottom line, the Business Impact Analysis is an important tool to justify the Disaster and Contingency Plan. Impact Analysis is the key to selecting the best and most cost effective recovery strategy.
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