Business continuity plan is a necessity for every enterprise. These plans are created to prepare the enterprise to continue its operations in the event of a catastrophic disaster, such as a flood, an earthquake, or a widespread power outage. Such a disaster is capable of shutting down business operations for long hours, which in turn may cause serious customer relationship problems.
These continuity plans basically cover major information technology (IT) infrastructure recovery, human resource problems and scenarios that must be dealt in case of any eventuality. Also, the company should be able to relocate and restart its operations from a remote location by re-establishing telecommunications, providing physical security, and required work areas for their employee.
IT infrastructure recovery is termed as disaster recovery (DR), which addresses all those issues involved in recovering servers, storage, data, and application services. Implementing an enterprise DR plan is a 4 step process, which is as follows.
STEP 1 – It is important to prioritize the critical business processes and understand the time-sensitivity of recovery of the related applications. Evaluate loss of revenue for such processes (in case of failure to start operations soon). DR plan must address all those critical processes that have a high impact on client day-to-day operations.
Step 2 – 1. Once the focus is fixed, evaluate the resources, time and key recovery metrics that is required. It is important to consider automated application recovery solutions that can shorten recovery time and continue business operations at the earliest.
Step 3: Determine the mode of recovery. Choose the remote recovery site, choose automation tools that support recovery processes so that implementation of DR plans is effectively done.
Step 4 – 1. Similar to a pilot test in case of product release, DR plans need to be tested. 3. This will provide an insight into recovery performance and the loop holes that may occur in real-time implementation.
When organization uses efficient solutions, they can very easily overcome all recovery challenges and resume daily business operations at the earliest.
Use disaster recovery solutions for reliable applications recovery.