Preserve critical business function in the face of disaster... BCP and DR

Suppose you run a business and have a world-wide based customer. You have promised your customer 99.9% uptime. This means 45min downtime/month equals 9 hr/hour Incident: Disaster occurs Anything that destroys normal processing capabilities Natural: Fire, flood, hurricance, tornado, earthquake, volcanoes Man-made: Plane crashes, vandalism, terrorism, sabotage, loss of personnel etc. And you don't have systems in place, you might not even notice that disaster happened, causing the downtime number to go much higher than promised. Result: Not only you could lose potential customers trying to access your systems, you may suffer lost revenue, lost customers or lost sales. What is the solution to this? The answer: BCP and DR. Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR are integral parts of the overall risk management for an organization. BCP is the process and methodology by which an organization prepares for and handles situations that are outside normal operations. It allows a company to analyze and then mitigate risks that would otherwise affect an organization's ability to maintain stable, normal operations. BCP addresses: a. Continuation of critical business processes b. Preparation, testing and maintenance of process to recover  Disaster recovery (DR) is the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, tollfree, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human induced disaster.


Statistics have shown that Of companies that had a major loss of computerized data without a disaster recovery plan: - 43% never reopen - 51% close within two years - only 6% will survive long-term The difference of using BCP and DR? Take this real scenario - The 1993 World Trade Center bombing,150 businesses out of 350 affected failed to survive the event - The firms affected by the Sept. 11 attacks with well-developed and tested BCP and DR manuals were back in business within days