Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
There are numerous contingency planning actions that organizations must provide to determine the course of action in the event business interruption. Some of the companies using BC/DR include Software Wholesale International and DRP International. The wish of every organization is to have its operations conducted uninterrupted. However, businesses live with several market threats that will often ensure the interruption of the business. Moreover, there is the need for the organizations to maintain resilience despite the volatility of the business environment (Conrad et al., 2014). As a result, several organizations have resorted to the adoption Business Continuity as well as disaster recovery.
The system is often under the threat of malicious attacks that are often targeting the organizational data. For businesses, it is important that the business is kept operable even during adversity. Having an online platform to run a business can sometimes be prone to vulnerabilities that ranging from cyber-attacks, denial of services to data theft often actualized through malicious intrusion. Whatever kind of disaster befalls an organization, they are under the obligation to protect user data and as such offer them the best business environment and ensure there are integrity and confidentiality. Due to the online platform and exploitations of the companies, cyber disaster is always viable (Conrad et al., 2014). Nonetheless, customers must be imbued with confidence in your services because there are always alternatives. Losing data can be derailing to the business but with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, there is a guarantee that the services will be rendered, and the business will always pick from the detriments of disasters.
Disaster Recovery Preparation Plan
It is important that organizations for understanding the nature of disasters and risks they are likely to face in situations of disaster (Ye et al., 2015). However, certain initial actions must be taken in the preparation for the recovery process. Sometimes, disaster recovery can take a sizable period and as a result, the damage already caused can increase if initial spread prevention measures are not taken. Therefore, organizations must prepare adequately to deal with emergency situations arising from the disaster. In the short period of an emergency situation, the business should take the following actions to help adequately prepare for the disaster recovery.
Develop contingency policy statement- the authority and recovery guidelines must be provided to help offer the insightful actions that should be taken during recovery.
Conduct impact analysis- the organization should identify the critical components of the system that are likely to be affected.
Identify the possible preventive controls- measures to limit the potential effects of service disruptions should be developed to help maximize the availability of the system (Ye et al., 2015).
Develop disaster recovery strategies- proper strategies that are aimed at providing the recovery of the system in an emergency should be developed to enable quick-service resumption after the disaster (Ye et al., 2015).
Develop the contingency plan- detailed procedures on how the damaged system can be restored should be developed. It will act as a guideline to the response and recovery team in their pursuit of corrective action.
Test the contingency plan- it is important that the developed plan be tested to determine how effective it can be in response to the dangers the system face. Once the plan is tested, it can be presumed to be effective if it meets the goals of the contingency plan. Sometimes the contingency plan might fail to provide effective disaster recovery guidelines thus leading to the recovery (Ye et al., 2015). Once everything conforms to the expected goals, the contingency plan can be declared effective for use by the recovery team.
Disaster Recovery Plan
Recovering information in the wake of disaster has become the priority of every organization. However, small organizations still do not have the understanding of what they could do to come out of such situations. It is thus important that they understand the dynamics of disaster preparedness and recovery contingency plan (Kyobe, 2010). In a bid to recover from a disaster, an organization should follow the following plan;
Incident detection-the organization must ensure that measures are in place to detect the disasters when they occur. The plan should start by defining measures to help detect the potent disaster.
Activate initial response team- after the incident detection; the initial disaster response team should be activated to take the prerequisite measures on the detected disaster (Kyobe, 2010). It will ensure that further spread of the disaster is prevented.
Establish incident command center- managing disasters require that there is a central point of authority to limit conflicting interests (Kyobe, 2010). An incident command center will act as the point of communication to the disaster management team.
Notify the recovery team- after setting up a command center, the disaster recovery team should be given details of the disaster for their synthesis.
Mobilize the recovery team- at this stage, the recovery team is provided with the necessary equipment to help take the actual measure of recovery from the disaster.
Restore network- after the recovery process, the system network should be restored to enable system security analysis.
Validate data integrity- at this phase, data analysis to determine the extent of tampering is done and corrective measures deployed.
Validate user connectivity- once the data integrity is validated, user connectivity is also checked to determine the suitability of their reconnection.
Resume operations- once everything is restored, the normal system operations can be authorized.
References
Conrad, E., Misenar, S., & Feldman, J. (2014). Domain 9: Legal, Regulations, Investigations, and Compliance. Eleventh Hour CISSP, 155-170
Ye, L., Gindling, T., & Li, S. (2015). Compliance with legal minimum wages and overtime pay regulations in China. IZA Journal of Labor & Development IZA J Labor Develop, 4(1).
Kyobe, M. (2010). Towards a framework to guide compliance with IS security policies and regulations in a university. 2010 Information Security for South America.
