Disaster Recovery Services
Disaster Recovery Plans and Business Continuity Plans
The differences between "Disaster Recovery Plans" and "Business Continuity Plans" are not always clear-cut.
In daily practice Business Continuity often refers to disaster recovery from a business point-of-view, or dealing with other issues, such as a failed disk, failed server, network switch or loss of Internet communications. It is often referred to as the measure of lost time in business operations.
In daily practice Disaster Recovery often refers to major disruption, such as a flooded building, fire, theft or total systems failure that disrupts or prevents access to an entire IT network or mission critical service. The issue of Business Continuity certainly arises when Disaster Recovery is required
Business Continuity Plan
BCP’s can be as in depth or as basic as required, but should always be easy to follow and up to date. The plan can be constructed using predefined criteria and include:
References to any related documents e.g. Disaster Recovery Plan
Aim of the plan
Objectives
Business impact analysis e.g. affect on service in first 8 hours etc
Resources required inc staff, data etc
Hazard analysis
Risk scoring 1-5 e.g. 1 = High likelihood & High impact
Critical function list
Key contact list
Disaster Recovery Plan
IT Failover & Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) can be a large undertaking, often with many facets and permutations to be considered. Always start with the basics and allow the plan to evolve over time, updating as necessary.
We can work with you to define what is important to keep the business running such as email, application/database access, accounts/payroll data and remote access.
Other key components that should be considered are the areas determining a disaster; who within the organization declares the disaster, which key employees are informed that a disaster has occurred or is occurring, and the level of exposure regarding the disaster that is released to clients
We can also help you develop the plan to include: testing and monitoring, data integrity checking and updating.
Systems Failover Components
Many businesses have one or more Systems Failover mechanisms to provide essential services in the event of a failure, business continuity or disaster recovery situation. We have successfully planned and implemented a wide range of failover systems in a variety of industry sectors, including:
Server Imaging
Server Virtualization
SAN Storage
Clustering
Data Synchronisation
Server Mirroring
Email Exchange Failover
Organisation Auditing
Security Auditing
