Every business organization involves
certain risks and threats that can affect the continuity of the firm in a
negative manner. Every firm seeks to maintain the safety of its hard as well as
soft copies of documents and assets. It is very imperative that a business
organization should have an effective plan for the continuity of its existence
even if it is affected by internal or external hazards. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) classifies these threats and hazards of a firm exposed to external
and internal environment and identify the process to prevent or recover the
assets from these threats so that the business can continue its operations in
the long run. Hence, it is the plan that highlights the systematic way of
surviving adverse conditions.
As Business Continuity Plan not only deals
with soft but also with hard assets of a business enterprise, it has a
technically sound process which starts with Business Impact Analysis (BIA).
Under BIA, activities of the firm are categorized into two categories i.e. critical
and non-critical activities. Activities of the organization whose delay would
be unacceptable are categorized as Critical and the categorization is done on
the basis of cost involved in recovery solutions. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery
Time Objective (RTO) are assigned to each critical activity. RPO determines the
maximum tolerable loss of data that cannot be recovered after the firm faces a
disaster whereas RTO determines the upper limit of Disruption Period’s
tolerance. Business enterprises should maintain the safety of data and recovery
options as per the RPO and RTO for proper flow of BCP.
Once the BIA is over, it is crucial to
analyze the hazards and risks of the business. This can be of two kinds, i.e.
man-made disasters and natural disasters. Some common threats to a commercial
organization are earthquake, flood, fire, theft, hurricane, terrorism, cyber
attack and critical system failure. After analyzing the risks, a proper
approach is made for recovery from each of the threats in case the business
faces one. Impact scenarios are made on the basis of the widest effect of
impact, for instance, loss of the building. Recovery requirement is checked
after all the analysis. Basically, the recovery plan is determined by Disaster Recovery solutions.
Disaster Recovery, a subset of Business
Continuity, is the process that prepares a firm for the recovery of important
technological data of the firm after the organization has been affected by a
threat. It should be noted that disaster recovery is only concerned with the IT
section of the firm only. Basically, there are three types of Disaster Recovery
Solutions, i.e. Preventive measure, Detective measure and Corrective measure.
As the names highlight, preventive measure relates to the way of preventing a
threat from occurrence, detective measure deals with the discovery or detection
of hazards to business and corrective measure provides the controls of
restoring the system after the occurrence of disaster.
To stay safe, majority organizations keep a
backup of important data by certain ways. Backups made and sent to off-site
location at regular intervals, duplicating the data to an off-site server and
updating important data to Cloud are some common strategies. It is very
imperative to follow Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Solutions
in our present world where disasters affect a business enterprise without prior
notice.
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disaster recovery broadly accessible for all applications and sites by
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