The Basics of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

You’re watching the approach of a hurricane - you have batteries, water, food, and a safe room should the cone turn your direction. You’ve planned for you and your family – have you done the same for your business?

Your customers and employees are counting on you to have DRBC plans in place to ensure the continued operation and future health of your company following a disaster. A DR (Disaster Recovery) plan is a Disaster Recovery plan which is the process by which a company recovers their access to software, data, and hardware that is necessary to resume critical business functions as soon as possible. The outline of steps for exactly how a company will resume its critical business functions is known as the Business Continuity plan.

These are the three cardinal rules for all Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans:

PLAN: This is the ‘who, what, and when thought out in advance, so in the event of an emergency situation you can act immediately to mitigate your loss and resume normal business functions as soon as possible.

COMMUNICATE: Communicate the plan to your employees so everyone is aware of their roles in the plan. Communicate during the emergency to be sure everyone is on the same page and to let everyone know you are there to help. Finally, communicate afterward so that everyone knows the steps to resume normal business activity.

TEST: The most important rule is to test, test, and test again. Just fire drills in grade school, it’s important for companies to test their disaster recovery and business continuity plans because ‘practice makes perfect and practice will ensure your plans are up-to-date and can be ‘tweaked’ if needed.