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Disaster Plan Business Continuity Template Customers
International in scope and cross industry acceptance
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in over 90 countries around the globe including
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Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in government, public, and private enterprises in almost all industries
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Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity News
Classifying systems for business continuity planning
April 29th, 2012
Every IT system has a unique cost vs. time or risk-tolerance profile, it is useful to categorize each application.
One classification of categories is:
- Mission-critical - applications require continuous availability and synchronous or near real-time failover to an alternate site
- Business critical - nearly continuous availability, but tolerate recovery times in the minutes
- Online - support important business processes, but with low usage and infrequent access, with minimal impact if down for a few hours
- Noncritical - systems or data stores that cause no significant business disruptive if offline for few days or even a week
- Offline or archival - applications and data are seldom-used systems with large amounts archival information that will not affect business operations if unavailable for a week or more
In addition to these categories, it is common to apply two standard parameters to applications for DR purposes: the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). The former describes the time window within which an application must be brought online to avoid significant business loss (financial or otherwise), while the latter quantifies the amount of acceptable data loss youre willing to suffer for a given application. In essence, RTOs focus on application availability and RPOs focus on data loss.
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Disaster Recovery Plan Testing
April 13th, 2012
In your disaster recovery business continuity plans do the availability and data protection solutions work? Are the RTOs and RPOs met? These certainly should be objectives. When disaster plans are tested are the objectives met? Too many times, plans are like neatly trimmed garden paths, which organizations follow to a successful conclusion. They are primers on how to pass the test, but would be of little use in a real disaster, if any number of the staff available for testing were unavailable. Temporary staff wouldn't know enough from the plans to figure out how to execute them, because they're more crib sheets than plans.
To the question of testing parts of the production environment at a time, rather than the whole data center, it's a matter of what the organiztion is trying to learn. Data centers are staffed to run the production environment. Many CIOs have focused on controlling costs and there are no "extra" hands available as a contingency measure, so disaster plans need to address how a few missing, key players would impact recovery effort.
Many disaster plans ignore one of the vital aspects of a data center recovery plan: the assumption the entire staff would be available at time of disaster. These plans just are not mature enough. Whether the organization tests the whole center or a few applications at a time, they need to inject some reality into it by "killing off" a few techs and/or DBAs to see how the disaster recovery plan works.
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Disaster recovery business infrastructure
April 2nd, 2012
CIOs need to implement a disaster-ready infrastructure along with it business continuity plans. Steps they should take include:
- Plan: When a business disruption threatens your top line and bottom line as well as your brand reputation, no company can afford to take chances.
- Focus on minimizing recovery time and reducing costs: Depending on your industry, location, number of employees and other considerations, the cost of downtime can range from tens of thousands to more than a million dollars an hour. A business impact analysis and risk assessment will paint a clearer picture of whats at stake for your organization.
- Implement data protection and disaster recovery: In the event of a disaster, business-critical personnel need access to systems, data and other resources to keep the business operational. Fortunately, its not necessary to double infrastructure and operational expenses in order to meet BC/DR requirements.
- Implement redundant hardware and intelligent routing: From redundant electronics and advanced routing protocols, to diverse network routes utilizing wide area network services to ensure network connectivity is maintained in the event of an outage or natural disaster.
- Focus on mainting continuous business operations: In an already challenging business climate, uninterrupted business operations are crucial to success. Have a business continuity solution that enables customers and employees to experience business as usual, even in the event of disruption.
- Test it before the event occurs: If is is not tested you have no assurance that it will work.
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Small Businesses Not Prepared for Disasters
March 1st, 2012
After reviewing the preliminary impacts of the recent hurricane on the East Coast, Janco finds that SMBs are not taking disaster preparedness for their computer and networking systems as seriously as they should. SMBs are at risk and most don't take action to prepare for disasters until after they have experienced loss from downtime. The result is that this lack of preparation has a significant impact on their customers and their business.
Over 30% of all Disaster Recover Business Continuity Plans are not current according to data gathered by Janco
There are plenty of partial, outdated, or ineffective disaster and business continuity plans out there - why is it so difficult to get it right?
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- Data collection
- Data inconsistency
- Categorization
- Manageability
- Maintenance
Benefits of having a disaster plan
February 26th, 2012
Recently an insurance brokers' association published the results of a survey which looked into the benefits that business continuity plans bring. A disaster planning template is required
The survey was based on just 83 responses from members and insurer partners identified the following benefits:- more info
- Having a business continuity plan in place will keep businesses trading when they would have otherwise have probably failed due to an incident.
- Business continuity plans can significantly reduce the cost of disruptions.
- Companies with business continuity plans benefit from insurance premium discounts, reduced excesses and doors opening to new insurance markets.
- Having a business continuity plan allows what would otherwise be unacceptable risks to be insured.
