Business Continuity Planning - Disaster Recovery

It is widely known that the creation of a stable business continuity and disaster recovery plan can be a complex undertaking.

Prior to creation of the plan itself, it is essential to consider the potential impacts of disaster and to understand the underlying risks: these are the foundations upon which a sound business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan should be built.

COMgroup has designed BCP/Disaster Recovery plans for many of its clients over the years. We can help you determine your risk analysis whether you need to start from scratch or whether you already have a proven and established plan. COMgroup can maintain and sustain your growing needs, providing you with the comfort of knowing redundancy efforts are foolproof.

A comprehensive Disaster Recovery solution encompasses ongoing assessment of risks, implementation and updates of business processes and technologies and regularly scheduled testing and review of the Disaster Recovery Plan. It is recommended to have employees take over roles or replace key employees in testing out functions. It is important that each member of the team understand all the critical processes that are called out in the Disaster Recovery Plan. Please note there are levels of primary site redundancy efforts that must first be considered depending on the size, budget and data needs of the company:

Every critical system would be duplicated off-site at another location where employees could immediately continue business operations if the primary company site were to fail.

Replication of all or just critical data on a daily basis. In the event of a failure of the primary site, employees could access that information from home or another location and continue primary business.

Critical questions that COMgroup would consider for your Disaster Recovery/BCP:

• Is senior management fully committed to disaster recovery?
• Has your company conducted a business impact analysis to quantify and rank the financial risk of IT outages?
• Has your company taken action to mitigate known IT risks and single points of network failure?
• Does your company have a written BCP that includes back-up and archive procedures?
• Has your company tested your plan using a worst-case scenario (loss of facility)?
• Did testing prove that your company meets all recovery time requirements?
• Is your company's business continuity plan updated regularly to keep it current with business and staffing changes?
• Does your company have an adequate budget to support your disaster recovery program?
• Has your company standardized on industry-standard media, tape drives, software and automated back-up solutions?
• For 24x7 applications, does your company remotely journal, log, mirror or electronically vault data to your hot site?
• Does your company understand the technology disaster recovery costs, options and disaster declaration procedures?
• Does your current back-up and recovery methodology meet management's business uptime needs?