Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan – An Efficient Backup System

As a business owner, you would be well aware of what is a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan. For the sake of the uninitiated, a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan is a plan made to recover important data post disaster to ensure that the business keeps running. There is no denial that a disaster will certainly cause certain downtime but the more you can minimize it the better is your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

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Here are a few benefits of having a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan:

1. A Cost effective end-to-end service
Cost effectiveness of a DR or disaster recovery plan is an important concern especially during tough financial times as these. The problem with evaluating the cost effectiveness of the DR plan is that disasters never surface and hence it becomes difficult to allocate budget to the plan. Data on a business server at the data center is certainly worth saving in the face of a disaster. It has been seen that DR plans have always proven themselves to be cost effective if implemented completely. The data damage that a disaster causes if not restored is usually worth much more than the budget allocated to execute the plan. Since these plans are end to end solutions they do everything from data backup to restoring it in case of a loss.

2. Eliminates the need for manual maintenance
With a disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place for continuous data backup, the business owner can be rest assured of protection against data loss in the event of a disaster. The manual maintenance that the enterprise would carry out without a disaster plan in place can be done away with. It stands for a fact that humans may fail and forget but machines cannot. Once programmed, the disaster recovery plan will automate a data backup and restoring template that eliminates the need of periodical manual data backup.

3. Provides a single point storage
A good disaster recovery and business continuity plan will have single point storage to do away with the hassle of recoveries from multiple stages. Single point storage enables allocating a single recovery point to get back all the lost data.

Having seen what all benefits does the DR plan brings along with it, it becomes imperative to know what all is necessary to develop an effective DR plan in order to enjoy such benefits.

Here are two essentials of developing a sound Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan:

1. Understanding Threats & Consequences
The first and foremost requirement is to assess the possible threat to your business and its consequences. There may be disasters that only temporarily affect your business due to presence of an alternative and there may be others that can cause a permanent dent in business continuity unless restored.

There may be simple problems such as communication failure due to disruption in the lines of fixed line phones. In such a case cellphones may enable the business to carry on but in case a storm strikes and the entire power grid fails for one week, then you need a sound DR plan to continue your business. In order to be able to deal with all disasters alike, you must have a thorough understanding of threats and their consequences in your area of operation.

SEE ALSO: Disaster Recovery for the Next Hurricane or Natural Disaster

2. Prevention, Detection & Correction
The age old adage of “Prevention is better than cure” holds very true for disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Prevention can only happen once the disaster is detected. However, in case prevention is not possible, as it will happen with some disasters, corrective measures need to be in place depending upon the severity of the disaster.

Detection involves measures such as using anti-virus, installing fire alarms, employee training sessions etc. Preventive methods involve keeping the data backed up off site, using surge protectors and conducting inspections regularly. Corrective measures are all measures such as restoring systems from a recovery point which are taken by the businesses to stand on their feet again after having been swept off.

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