Any successful company that wants to stand the test of time will at some stage need to implement a disaster recovery or business continuity plan to ensure there is an appropriate procedure to minimise the impact of disasters and general issues on their business.
Personally, I think "Disaster" is quite a strong word and sometimes detracts from the importance of developing a planned procedure for recovery of your business from unforeseen circumstances. Disasters occur once in a long while whilst issues that can affect the normal business operation occur much more frequently.
As a general concept, any business should ask themselves three key questions;
1. How do we detect and identify potential issues that will effect business continuity?
2. How can we prevent these issues from occurring?
3. If these issues occur, how do we recover from them?
This should start you thinking about what if scenarios.
You should also consider the plan to be a progressive instrument for your organisation. There's little point in creating a brilliant plan only to shelve it until there's an issue and finding when you need it most it’s out of date.
You should also test the elements of the plan to make sure your recovery process works. This exercise may also reveal additional issues that you might not have considered which you should feed back into the plan.
Budget is also a major consideration. If you have unlimited funds your options for a resilient plan are boundless, sadly for most of us that's not the case. This is where the knowledge of your computer services provider will help you the most. Anyone worth their weight will have experience with recovery issues and be able to provide assistance and input towards your plan.
The geographical layout of your organisation should also be considered as this can contribute a major factor towards your plan. For example; with adequate data connections, data backup can be made to a separate office, building or facility your company has access too.
Our company website holds a sample of a very basic plan that will give you some idea of where to start. In addition there are some useful resources out there on the web;
http://www.pirantech.co.uk/products-and-services/downloads.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_recovery#General_steps_to_follow_while_creating_BCP.2FDRP
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