Mapping out your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning

Introduction

In the event of an emergency, your business needs to continue operating as normal. This means having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place that covers all aspects of your organization from finance to IT. With the right processes in place, you can ensure that your staff are trained on how to deal with any kind of emergency situation and that critical systems remain online at all times.

Determine your organisation’s critical systems and services

In order to determine your organisation’s critical systems and services, you must first understand what a critical system is. A critical system is any system that provides core business functions or processes. These can include:

• Email servers and messaging systems
• Web servers, intranets and extranets (including file sharing)
• Database servers (SQL Server, Oracle etc.)
• Application servers (such as SharePoint)

Plan your disaster testing and recovery strategy

• Test your plan.
• What to test? Your disaster recovery and business continuity plans should be tested regularly, so that you can ensure they are current and accurate. You should also test each component of your plan individually to ensure it works as expected. This may take the form of a tabletop exercise where you walk through each step of the process or even an actual simulated disaster scenario that tests how well employees respond in an emergency situation (i.e., fire drill).
• How do I test my plan? There are many ways you can test your plan:
• Tabletop exercises where all participants gather together at one location, discuss what would happen if there was an actual incident in their area (or another location), go over steps necessary for responding to this type of event, identify any gaps between what is needed now versus what would be needed then (i.e., additional resources needed), etc.; -Simulated drills where employees practice their response procedures by participating in mock emergencies like power outages or fires; -External auditors who perform periodic reviews on internal processes such as backup validation checks

Choose the right backup strategy

Deciding on the right backup strategy for your business is a crucial step in your DR/BCP planning. You should choose a backup strategy based on your needs and test it regularly to ensure that it works as intended. The type of data you need to back up, where it’s stored, how often you need to back up and how much time it takes to complete all affect which type of backup method will work best for you.

The decision about which tool or system to use depends on many factors: budget restraints, location (off-site vs in-house), number of employees who need access and their roles within the company–to name just a few considerations. Some companies may opt for cloud storage services while others might prefer tape drives because they’re more cost effective than disk-based options like those provided by Amazon Glacier or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Service (formerly known as Windows Azure Storage). Whatever option(s) suits your needs best will depend entirely upon what works best within each organization’s context; however there are several things everyone should keep in mind when developing their own strategies:

Develop a business continuity plan for employees

The first thing to do is make sure that your staff are aware of how they will access information in the event of a disaster and what their responsibilities are during an emergency.

You should also make sure that they know where to go and who to contact if they are unable to get into the office.

Create a plan for IT infrastructure recovery and virtualisation

Virtualisation is a technology that allows you to run multiple operating systems on one physical machine. This means that you can reduce costs and use fewer resources, but it also makes disaster recovery and business continuity easier.

The reason for this is simple: if there’s an outage at your data centre, then all of your virtual machines are still intact in their original location. If no physical host servers were damaged in the disaster (in which case they would need to be rebuilt), then the only thing that needs recovering is each VM’s data files–which should be backed up anyway!

Train staff on how to respond in an emergency situation.

• Train staff on how to respond in an emergency situation.
• Make sure your staff know what to do in a disaster and the best way for them to help.
• Train your employees on the different types of emergencies that could occur, such as fire or flood.
• Make sure your employees know how to contact the right people at their company during an emergency so that everything runs smoothly during that time period when everyone else is panicking and not thinking straight!

Make sure you have the right processes in place so that your business can stay up and running in any disaster.

• Make sure you have a plan.
• Make sure everyone knows the plan.
• Make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do in an emergency.
• Test your plan regularly, so that it will be ready when disaster strikes (and there’s no time for testing).
• Have a backup plan for every aspect of your business continuity program–from data backup and recovery to email server migration, from network security updates to building evacuation procedures–because things always go wrong at the worst possible time!

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you to understand the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. It’s not just about having a plan in place, but also making sure that everyone knows what to do when something goes wrong. The key takeaway from this article is that before anything else happens, make sure your organisation has considered all possible scenarios so that it can react quickly and effectively when faced with any emergency situation.