Disaster recovery and business continuity

Organizations of various shapes and sizes spend a lot on automating business processes. However, this is relevant, only if it integrates with other business processes.

If any part of the business process gets affected, the entire business chain come to a standstill and business continuity automatically gets affected. Consequently, the business continuity practice assumes significant importance along with the other infrastructure.

Our special on business continuity looks at these aspects in-depth. Defining a foolproof business continuity policy itself poses a major challenge, as is the RoI justification for business continuity practice.

You cannot be prepared enough, especially against natural calamities, as no one knows when it would strike and in what form. Most enterprises could be prepared merely to protect themselves against simple disasters.

One CIO proposes that an organization should consider business continuity plan (BCP) as a practice rather than a protection mechanism. It should be handled like Six Sigma, ISO, TPM, TQM, etc.

Yet another CIO believes that as no BCP will fully guarantee that you are protected from an outrage or data loss scenario, one should understand the expected service levels and recovery objectives of the business and to architect an appropriate solution to minimize the risk and impact of unexpected failures.

A vendor points out that instead of distributing applications and data across multiple branches, those should be brought to a centralized data center and disaster recovery (DR) should be planned for this data center. Consolidation simplifies DR planning and optimizes IT resources. Another adds that identifying the critical process that would run uninterrupted, was most important.

Would love to hear what you are doing for BCP and disaster recovery!