Businesses are fragile things. They can be affected in their success by a whole host of factors including market forces, consumer habits, and changes in attitudes.
But many aspects of your business success are firmly held in your own hands. You can develop an agile approach allowing you to change your model based on market forces, you can adapt your products or services to take into account consumer demands, and you can keep track of people's opinions to ensure you keep with current thinking and attitudes.
But how would you cope with a major incident that occurred to or in your business?
Business continuity and disaster recovery are essential tools designed to protect your business should the worst happen.
If you make use of technology in your business, and particularly if it forms the backbone of your operations, you need to make sure you have a Disaster Recovery Plan.
Disaster Recovery is the process of recovering your technical systems, data and applications to a level which allows you to continue operating your business.
Sometimes a DR solution will only recover key systems - just enough to keep you going in the short term until a full recovery can be performed.
A technical disaster or incident can be caused by a number of internal factors including technical faults, accidental damage caused by errors, or malicious activity.
Disasters can also be caused by external factors such as power cuts, floods or property damage.
The key to an effective DR plan is to evaluate which systems, applications and data are key to your operations and ensuring these are recovered first. There is no point spending time and effort recovering your marketing database when your customers aren't getting the products they've ordered or the services they've bought.
Getting your DR plan right can mean the difference between having a business in serious trouble and your customers not even knowing there was a problem.
A Business Continuity Plan is similar in many ways to a Disaster Recovery Plan. The main difference is that the BCP deals with more than just technology.
Your BCP covers all aspects of your business, from offices and desk space, communications, and operations, to incident response, staff safety and public relations.
Whether you decide your business needs a full BCP or merely a DRP you should be aware that having one and making sure it is up to date and tested can be the difference between your business surviving and growing and it's complete failure.
There are many statistics out there about business survival following an incident, but the general consensus is that businesses experiencing a major incident and who don't have an effective BCP will go out of business within 6-24 months of the incident.
You have insurance to cover you should the worst happen. A Business Continuity Plan or at the least a Disaster Recovery Plan should help protect you in the same way - by ensuring your business survives whatever is thrown at it!
Sabtu, 30 September 2017
Rabu, 13 September 2017
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Don't Focus on the Wrong Areas When Making Your Plans
Sure, planning for catastrophic failures such as tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes can make your day more interesting. But the fact of the matter is most Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery incidents involve situations far more mundane.
According to Strategic Research Corp., the leading causes of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery incidents are:
o 44% Hardware Failure-Servers, disk drives, switches or other core infrastructure components.
o 32% Human Error-The primary mode of human error is either a mistake in a configuration setting or issuing the wrong command on a production system. Human error happens more frequently after hardware replacements and upgrades.
o 14% Software and Firmware Errors-These failures are often related to operating systems errors, driver incompatibilities, and the introduction of new applications to servers that contend for resources.
o 7% Virus/Security Breach-In today's world malicious attacks do happen. Therefore a solid security plan must be part of any credible BCDR initiative. This type of BCDR incident has been increasing and it is vitally important your BCDR solution be able to provide a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) prior to the time of attack.
o 3% Natural Disaster-Natural disasters are often cited as a leading reason for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning but they represent a relatively small percentage of actual BCDR events.
Perhaps even less exciting is that studies show that planned downtime accounts for 70-90 percent of all system outages!
This suggests that we need to look at the concept of business continuity and disaster recovery from the other end of the telescope, effectively inverting the common view to yield a new set of priorities for "disaster" prevention.
Proposed Emphasis for BCDR Planning:
70-90% of planning focused on minimizing planned downtime
7-25% of planning focused on preventing un-planned downtime
3-5% of planning focused on natural disaster recovery
When viewed in this context and with the overall goal of supporting business process functionality, it becomes clear that we must build the case for business continuity and disaster recovery into the foundation of our infrastructure, not consider it something optional to be looked at separately.
According to Strategic Research Corp., the leading causes of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery incidents are:
o 44% Hardware Failure-Servers, disk drives, switches or other core infrastructure components.
o 32% Human Error-The primary mode of human error is either a mistake in a configuration setting or issuing the wrong command on a production system. Human error happens more frequently after hardware replacements and upgrades.
o 14% Software and Firmware Errors-These failures are often related to operating systems errors, driver incompatibilities, and the introduction of new applications to servers that contend for resources.
o 7% Virus/Security Breach-In today's world malicious attacks do happen. Therefore a solid security plan must be part of any credible BCDR initiative. This type of BCDR incident has been increasing and it is vitally important your BCDR solution be able to provide a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) prior to the time of attack.
o 3% Natural Disaster-Natural disasters are often cited as a leading reason for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning but they represent a relatively small percentage of actual BCDR events.
Perhaps even less exciting is that studies show that planned downtime accounts for 70-90 percent of all system outages!
This suggests that we need to look at the concept of business continuity and disaster recovery from the other end of the telescope, effectively inverting the common view to yield a new set of priorities for "disaster" prevention.
Proposed Emphasis for BCDR Planning:
70-90% of planning focused on minimizing planned downtime
7-25% of planning focused on preventing un-planned downtime
3-5% of planning focused on natural disaster recovery
When viewed in this context and with the overall goal of supporting business process functionality, it becomes clear that we must build the case for business continuity and disaster recovery into the foundation of our infrastructure, not consider it something optional to be looked at separately.
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