Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are the kinds of things nobody really wants to work on. Planning for the unlikely seems like a waste of time, until the unlikely happens. What we’re looking at here is just the technology side of things, but there are larger business concerns as well, such as personnel, facilities and communications.

If you rely heavily on technology for work or play, it’s a good idea to spend some time thinking about—and planning—what you will do in the event of a disruption. At the bottom of this post I have provided links to some other resources that may be helpful in your planning.

BCP involves figuring out how to keep your operations running in the event of a disruptive incident: a fire, earthquake, hurricane—or even something relatively minor, like a computer hard drive failure, an extended loss of your network connection, or theft of critical equipment.

DR is a subset of BCP and deals with protecting the business in the event that all or part of its systems become unavailable for an extended period, or entirely unusable.

Control Measures as part of a BCP

Preventive Measures (anti-virus, physical security, passwords)
Detective Measures (system diagnostics programs, audit trails)
Corrective Measures (data backups, redundant systems, spare equipment)

Here are a few checklist items that might help in thinking through various scenarios:

Computer
- keep a current bootable clone on hand (system restore)
- spare computer to boot from
- spare hard drive on hand
- daily/hourly file backups (file restore)
- consider using laptops for remote working
File sharing access
- server with a backup to restore from
- online file service (redundant copy)
Email Service
- personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, ISP)
- have more than one account, most are free
Data network
- redundant secondary internet connection (DSL, cable)
- home network for remote option
- wireless access cards for the computer (Sprint, Verizon)
Voice network
- cell phones

Some questions to consider when making your plans:

If my computer crashes, how will I continue working?
If my shared file access/server becomes unavailable, what will I do?
If our office is inaccessible (flood, fire) where will my team work, and will they have the tools they need to conduct business?
If my data network goes down, what’s my backup connectivity option?
How will we communicate our alternative plans to customers and business partners?