Understanding The Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery Planning

By Author: Ki Grinsing
Total Articles: 82
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Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are two different processes but commonly combined together into a single management framework - a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning provides a framework for the recovery of business function after a disaster.

In developing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning firstly we need to understand the different between the Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC). The different between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity can be described with the following scenario.

In an incident where the fire sweeps the server room where all the servers reside, destroying everything in it including all the servers and the entire supporting infrastructure, the network routers, the LAN Switches, the network cabling and everything - nothing left. In the documentation of your business continuity and disaster recovery planning, you will take some Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity processes.

Disaster Recovery (DR) example:

To restore the data (thanks to your daily backup strategy) ...
... to alternate servers in an alternate site, you need to do the recovery to a basic operational level. This will allow the users to continue working immediately after the restoration completed and the system is available again. This is the DR part of your business continuity and disaster recovery planning processes.

Business Continuity (BC) Example:

In an effort to invoke the full Business Continuity plan for this fire disaster, you would do the following steps:
Purchasing new server units including the supported equipments including Switches, Routers network, and other networking infrastructures
Rebuilding the physical server rooms and other facilities such as network cabling, server racks with a new and much better design including the easy to reach fire extinguisher placement and other things to comply with the HSE.
Long hard works of migrating the current data and users management to new system
We see now the different between the disaster recovery and business continuity which all should be managed within your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Business Continuity Disaster Recovery Planning

Every organization should manage the information system infrastructure and protect against any potential threats, and should also manage the disaster recovery and business continuity planning against any damage or loss in the event of a disaster. Threats to IT infrastructure are real and costs companies millions of dollars each year, therefore guidelines about disaster recovery planning must be developed to assist in the identification and prevention of potential risks which may impact the business.

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning provides a framework for the recovery of your IT infrastructure from any kinds of specific disaster both large and small in scale. A Disaster Recovery planning assists in providing a pre-defined and co-ordinate list of steps for the minimization of the overall effects of a disaster and recovery from a disaster. During or following a disaster, a Disaster Recovery planning aids in avoiding confusion to ensure a swift recovery to a stable level of business continuity operations.

Preventive Strategy

In your business continuity and disaster recovery planning should manage the Preventive Strategies which includes the methods that should be taken to avoid a potential disaster from happening.
Such measures are crucial to the mitigation of the risk and are usually implemented upon the identification of a potential risk. Examples of preventative strategies include:

Daily backup and Data backup in a weekly or monthly basis should be taken stored off site.
Properly and well managed firewalls will protect from potential hacking or any types of network security threats.
Anti-virus software deployed to all the servers and computers to protect the virus outbreaks
Two redundant Internet connections being terminated into two different exchanges to avoid loss of Internet connectivity.

Recovery

In your business continuity and disaster recovery planning, recovery strategies should include the steps t taken when a disaster occurs. The executions of the steps should be swift to avoid the prolonged timeframes in an acceptable level of operation. The following are examples of recovery strategies:
Performing a regular data restore test from the tapes should be done to make sure that data restoration will work perfectly in case of disaster.
Managing the alternate server room with acceptable standby backup servers in the event of the main server rooms facilities destroyed. Particularly the domain servers and or DNS server which are critical to the operation of the system
Spare server in an alternative location for the restoration of the data in the event of the main file and print servers failing.
Being prepared for a disaster is much better before the disaster destroy everything.

Bio:
Ki Grinsing has long years of working experiences in IT, graduated from a university with the addition of MCS and CCNA certifications. For a complete article visit this link WAN Technologies and Sample risk assessment