What happens when everything you do is critical? Increasingly, for many organizations,
that's the situation when they sit down to do disaster recovery or business continuity
planning.
Unlike a few years ago, it was easy to isolate a few specific IT systems and
applications as critical resources that needed to be protected in event of a
natural or man-made disaster. However, most organizations and business processes
have evolved to a point where almost every IT application, database and system
is critical to the smooth operation of the business. Like it or not, people
become dependant on the applications they use every day and getting a business
back up and running after a disruption often requires planning to replicate
to reproduce all an organizations important applications. For example, even
though email was considered an ancillary communication tool in some organizations
as recently as five or six years ago, it's probably a critical intra- and extra-company
communication mechanism for almost all companies these days.
To help companies plan for overcoming problems or disasters and ensuring the
continuity of business processes and IT applications, I've assembled a few tips
and recommendations that organizations should consider when doing strategic
recovery and continuity planning. I recommend that organizations:
* Take a process approach - Many organizations approach DR or BC as a project-something
that they need to do once, and then assume it's completed. With rapid change
in both IT and business environments, it's important to use a process approach
for strategic business continuity planning-it needs to be continually updated
and revised as business requirements change or dictate.
*Set the right expectations - An important part of a good DR or BC approach
is to make sure to set expectations correctly. Working with business managers
and corporate management to prioritize, decide, and communicate how long it
will take to restore specific systems after a problem. Let them know whether
it will take 5 minutes or 5 hours to get their email back.
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