Common Approaches and Drawbacks in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans
Common Approaches and Drawbacks in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans
Business continuity is essential as described by Hiles (2014). It is the ability of an organization to survive and thrive, survive and bounce back after a disaster or catastrophes. The general objective is to accomplish the mission for the organization no matter what disruptions happen along the way. Business continuity as described by Rima (2013) focuses on an organization's capacity to continue operations irrespective of the nature of interruption. The business continuity planning (BCP) is a methodology that can be studied, and practitioners can be certified by Rima (2013) points out. A Disaster recovery plan is a subset of BCP since it addresses stopping the effects of the disaster, catastrophe or event. After the effects of the disaster or event have been addressed, business continuity activities typically begin.
Types of Catastrophes
Catastrophes can be broken down into two subcategories, physical problems, and catastrophes. Physical catastrophes can be air conditioner failures, power issues, fire or even hacking attacks. Human error can cause a disaster. One team member where I used to work accidentally did a 'rm –rf *' in the root directory of a Linux machine in the office. The rm Linux commands is a remove or delete everything. So this deletes the whole drive while the system was running.
Natural Disasters and Real-World Applications
Catastrophes can also occur caused by Mother Nature. These types of catastrophes should have disaster recovery plans. In the Christchurch New Zealand earthquake many companies downtown had their disaster recovery plans tested. If a building was red stickered the company was not allowed into the building to retrieve anything out of the data center. The organization had to rebuild the company infrastructure from the backups or backup or redundant systems. The company in Christchurch I worked for managed to get all the systems up and running after the earthquake. Getting a system online took a week to bring online since no access to the building was available. Since it was a software company the mitigation strategy was bring our customer support system, email server and company phone system online to assist customers.
Common Drawbacks and Mitigation Strategies
The main drawbacks of common approaches business continuity and disaster recovery plans, in my opinion, is the lack of testing or regularly executing a plan put in place. One New Zealand power company I assisted would fail the entire system from a primary to a secondary location every six months. Each team member had a chance to follow the procedures, and at the end of the test, updates were made to make the process more robust.
References
- Business Continuity Management by A.N.A.K. Hiles - Comprehensive guide on business continuity management principles and practices published by Rothstein Publishing (2014).
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning for IT Professionals by C. Rima - Detailed resource on BCP methodology and certification for IT professionals published by Elsevier Science (2013).