Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

While these situations are not entirely avoidable, an organization’s ability to recover from such setbacks largely depends on how much energy has been invested into identifying and mitigating risk through the use of a well-established business continuity plan. Lindros and Tittel (2013) explain that business continuity refers to maintaining business functions, or quickly recovering such functions in the event of a major disruption, and the lack of planning doesn’t just mean an organization will take longer to recover, but may never recover at all. The first step to developing an effective continuity plan is a thorough planning process in which an organization establishes

Step 2: This stage may require a negotiation with key stakeholders concerning the definition of success. Also, the coaching plan and resources are agreed and committed. For example, in this stage, the coach should present and agree the executive development needs and goals, identify and outline a suitable action plan, propose suggestions about milestones and metrics, and agree how progress will be measured.

The next step will be to prepare the operation plans. The operation plans should also reflect the scope and goals of the business, and they should consider several elements like competition in the market, infrastructure and many things that can be fundamental in ensuring the business gains a competitive advantage. The last step is to integrate plans. It is important to make sure that the plans have been properly balanced so that they can be able to support one another. The plans should be clearly communicated to the people implementing them. It is also important to review the plans from time to time to make sure that they in line with the trends in the business environment.

These are the first two Phases of Planned change as defined by Ronald Lippitt, et al, in 1858: Phase 1 Diagnose the problem, Phase 2 Assess motivation and capacity for change. (Mitchell 2013)

The CIOB should develop a Disaster Recovery Plan to support the Company’s Business Continuity Plan, one that will have an effective decision on the components of the IT infrastructure required to support the business.

Key factors of the business continuity/disaster recovery plans are designed to ensure that the three principles of information security remain intact even if there is some kind of a disaster or service interruption. Perhaps the greatest of there is the area of “availability”. This is especially true when one considers what the VPN means to being able to communicate electronically in the midst of a crisis. One must remember that in normal operations information security is important and in times of distress it is that more imperative. This at times will prove to be challenging to say the least. However, the business continuity plan as well as the disaster recovery plan must spell out how the services of the affected area(s) will

Planning Phase: During this phase, audit objectives and scope are developed, and management is notified of the planned audit.

It is reported by Illinois State University in its Emergency Management Plan (EMP) that continuity of services is of primary importance during emergency management response. Stated specifically is that the "the ability of the university to recover from an emergency will depend primarily upon the efforts of individual departments toward the development of effective business continuity plans. These plans are designed to outline how departments will continue to provide their

Managing a successful corporation needs a comprehension of the techniques of serving consumers, irrespective of the marketplace situations. A business continuity plan will help Silver Springs Company keep running during bad publicity, natural disasters, and economic downturns, to mention just a few (Rommel, 2010). While some businesses like believing that they are able to come up quickly with “Plan B” for working through crises, the world’s best organizations expend time creating plans for incidences they hope would never take place.

A disaster recovery plan also known as a contingency plan is a plan created to be able to deal with future threats to the business. Such threats make it difficult for the organisation to function correctly which is why the contingency plan consists of a set of precautions that will either minimise or contain the situation, usually the business plan isn not completely fool proof and still has risks that can not be terminated which is why the recovery plan contains a breakdown of the procedure of the business where each segment of the process has a contingency of its own to counter the cons of it.

and therefore assist businesses’ contingency planning. To this end the paper highlights some key events and

Step 2- It is the responsibility of IT to ensure the business has been informed about the options and costs of higher availability.

A disaster is “an occurrence that disrupts the functioning of the organization resulting in loss of data, loss of personnel, loss of business or loss of time” (Hiatt, 2010, P.4). There are four broad categories of disasters. According to Hiatt (2010), disaster occurs as a result of accidents, internal factors such as sabotage, natural disasters like earthquake and armed conflict such as war or terrorism (Hiatt, 2010). In each of these categories, the goal is to mitigate the impact and quickly recover from the disaster. In other to do that effectively, the organizations should put a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place before the actual disaster occurs. The DR plan, which is usually embedded in most organization’ business continuity

Disasters have become an inevitable part of businesses and organizations as well. They not only have a major effect on business and organizational continuity; they also result to an overhaul in organizational operational mechanisms (Awasthy, 2009). It is for this reason that many organizations and business resort to preparing business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans that will facilitate better disaster management in future. Effective disaster recovery plans are important to every business and organization (Thejendra, 2008).

Creating a delivery plan and incorporating risk mitigation strategies into the delivery plan. The third phase is the explore phase. This phase delivers product features. The aspects of this stage include delivering planned feature by managing workload, creating a collaborative project community that is facilitated by a project manager, and lastly managing the team’s interactions with customers and stakeholders. The fourth phase is the adapt phase, in which the results are reviewed from customer, technical people and process performance, and project status perspectives. The last stage is the close phase. The objective of this stage is to learn and incorporate what you have learned to pass on to the next project team. This should be a time of celebration of your success. APM’s should govern all project teams no matter how big they may be.