How will your business survive a Disaster? If you are a small business owner then you probably have never thought about putting together a Disaster Recovery Plan or a Business Continuity Plan.
You may have thought that a Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Plan was too expensive or not necessary for your type of business.
You couldn't be any further from the truth.
You see Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning built around your business and your needs.
First Lets explain what the Difference between a Business Continuity Plan a Disaster Recovery Plan is: 1)Disaster Recovery Plan is actually a small subset of a Business Continuity Plan.
So Let's Define a Business Continuity Plan: A Business Continuity Plan is a document or guide of procedure on how to handle and to "continue" running your business due to a Business Interruption.
What is a Business Interruption.
That is anything from Power Outages, Vandalism, Crime, and yes Disasters{Both Natural and Man Made}.
There are many factors involved when putting one of these plans together including Financial, Legal, Human Resources, and of course technological.
For the purpose of this material we are going to concentrate on the technology of this subject.
Each contingency described above has its own set of rules for dealing with the interruption.
A Business Continuity Plan for dealing with an Extended Power Outage is very much different then a Theft.
A Disaster Recovery Plan then deals with Business interruption due to a Disaster.
Here are some key elements when putting together a Disaster Recovery Plan.
-How much time can you be "offline" before your business will become effected? -How will you communicate with your Employees? -How will you communicate with you Vendors? -How will you communicate with your Customers? -Where are your paper records stored? - What is the least amount of equipment required to come back online? -What are your Line of Business Application? -Where is the Data Stored? -How is the Data being backed up? -Where is the backed up Data being stored? -Is the Data relevant and good? - Were will you run your business from temporarily? Do you have a place already to go? -Do you need a Hot Site, Warm Site, or Cold Site? -How will you get new computers and servers ? -Do you have a budget put together for the purchase of new computers and servers at least until the insurance company can reimburse you? There is a lot more that goes into a Disaster Recovery Plan but as stated before these are some key elements and depending on the nature of your business they can fairly easy to answer.
The biggest thing to know about any Good Disaster Recovery Plan or Business Continuity Plan is that once written they will still need testing if at least quarterly to make sure the information is relevant.
You may have thought that a Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Plan was too expensive or not necessary for your type of business.
You couldn't be any further from the truth.
You see Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning built around your business and your needs.
First Lets explain what the Difference between a Business Continuity Plan a Disaster Recovery Plan is: 1)Disaster Recovery Plan is actually a small subset of a Business Continuity Plan.
So Let's Define a Business Continuity Plan: A Business Continuity Plan is a document or guide of procedure on how to handle and to "continue" running your business due to a Business Interruption.
What is a Business Interruption.
That is anything from Power Outages, Vandalism, Crime, and yes Disasters{Both Natural and Man Made}.
There are many factors involved when putting one of these plans together including Financial, Legal, Human Resources, and of course technological.
For the purpose of this material we are going to concentrate on the technology of this subject.
Each contingency described above has its own set of rules for dealing with the interruption.
A Business Continuity Plan for dealing with an Extended Power Outage is very much different then a Theft.
A Disaster Recovery Plan then deals with Business interruption due to a Disaster.
Here are some key elements when putting together a Disaster Recovery Plan.
-How much time can you be "offline" before your business will become effected? -How will you communicate with your Employees? -How will you communicate with you Vendors? -How will you communicate with your Customers? -Where are your paper records stored? - What is the least amount of equipment required to come back online? -What are your Line of Business Application? -Where is the Data Stored? -How is the Data being backed up? -Where is the backed up Data being stored? -Is the Data relevant and good? - Were will you run your business from temporarily? Do you have a place already to go? -Do you need a Hot Site, Warm Site, or Cold Site? -How will you get new computers and servers ? -Do you have a budget put together for the purchase of new computers and servers at least until the insurance company can reimburse you? There is a lot more that goes into a Disaster Recovery Plan but as stated before these are some key elements and depending on the nature of your business they can fairly easy to answer.
The biggest thing to know about any Good Disaster Recovery Plan or Business Continuity Plan is that once written they will still need testing if at least quarterly to make sure the information is relevant.
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