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Small Business Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

By Jason Kato | May 9, 2007

You manage a small business and have a collection of computers that operate your company, complete with Internet connections and email. As the key person in charge, you know it’s important to have Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans in place and could use some hints on the subject.

First, be aware the topic of disaster recovery and business continuity is both deep and wide. There are highly specialized, certified individuals (and organizations) dedicated to the definition, practices, precision, and ranking of top-tier disaster recovery / business continuity environments. The associated resources, procedures, time and effort are vast, necessary, and expected for such solutions. Conversely, small business stakeholders often desire a lighter-weight approach, which, for our discussion, presumes you already understand the concept of a disaster, the need to recover from one, and how you’d get back to continued normal operations: the business continuity part.

The following tips and information contain key elements from the “pros”, moderated by the capability and constraints common to your mini-corporation. For simplicity, you might consider disaster recovery and business continuity as a joint single plan with two parts.

Array Systems business continuity plan includes:

·Categorization. Where possible, the plan should be condensed enough to be complete, yet flexible enough to cover the range of disasters out there. Of course, the loss of a printer is not as great as the loss of payroll, and neither is as painful as a destructive earthquake. Conduct a serious discussion to determine what may, should and must be in the plan. Understand what defines “it will never happen”, total “overkill”, and any points between these two for your organization.

·Backups. These include a method of backup storage for key data files, software, documents, and other items you will need to recover from a disaster. Second-copy paper, optical, magnetic, electronic, online, etc. mechanisms can be part of this activity. Obviously, some form of testing/validating the retrieval and usefulness of your backup processes and procedures are implied.

·Technology. Sometimes, a simple solution can resolve critical problems. For example, an office of writers simply switched from desktops to laptops to prevent the loss of work when experiencing intermittent power problems.

·Communication. By this, we mean having a way to identify a disaster has occurred, a reliable method to alert internal stakeholders, external customers, and key responders, and finally, a reverse method to announce appropriate feedback to affected parties. The plan may include special messaging, phone calls, email, or other techniques depending on the level and content required.

·Physical. Companies tied to physical components (warehouses, manufacturing, internal processing, etc.) will need added planning beyond restoring computer systems and IT services. For these more physical aspects (power, air conditioning, building security, fire/earthquake, etc.), business continuity may have a priority over absolute disaster recovery procedures. Perhaps a secondary location can be part of such a plan, and also part of the technology method.

Experts agree that inadequate planning, testing and senior-level support are the top mistakes companies make with regard to disaster recovery / business continuity execution. An even greater concern is not fully addressing the subject at all. If so, how do I start?

Perhaps the place to start is with an analysis of your business operation and review of your current disaster recovery / business continuity plan. Consider the listed suggestions, and don’t forget possible training, documentation, and updates as your organization grows. Or, seek the help you may require; sometimes another set of eyes makes all the difference.

Steve Goto
Project Manager and Systems Engineer
Array Systems - IT Consulting

Topics: Disaster Recovery |