Business Continuity Planning and Data Recovery Guide

In today's business world, data is the lifeblood of the organization. A growing number of businesses today store and analyze large amounts of electronic information about their products, processes, customers, sales, and more.

There is sufficient data collected by Google that, if printed and stacked on top of each other, would reach the moon within two days.

Today, businesses rely on a variety of mission-critical information ecosystems in order to survive and thrive. These include mobile devices, electronic medical records, cloud applications, virtualized environments, and big data.

Use this Guide to develop internal Business Continuity and Data Recovery procedures, documentation, and exercises that will support your company's objectives.

Building these for your organization will prepare you to build real-world solutions for your customers.

We'll decode some of the jargon:

Continuity and recovery of data are two different things. Each can be developed into very successful practices. These terms act as two distinctly different but interconnected parts of risk management.

Business continuity refers to a proactive approach to the long-term operations of a business. As part of the business continuity plan, the people, processes and technology required to continue operations are identified. In order to develop a BCP, it is essential to identify the business's critical, nice-to-have, and wants.

The Disaster Recovery Plan outlines step-by-step recovery plans for application failures, vendor contact information, and recovery priorities for business systems. No matter what the reason may be, the plan typically begins with a loss of data access.

24% of data losses occur due to human error, 21% due to hardware failure, and 19% due to data corruption. It's a staggering 64%.

Risk Assessment is the systematic process of identifying areas of potential risk to corporate operations. As cloud computing advances, conducting a risk assessment can have a significant number of external parties to identify.

Data replication is the process of making copies of data for use in the event of a data loss. In most cases, the data is replicated locally and then copied to a remote system or service.

Redundancy refers to creating multiple paths to the same set of systems. Redundancy does not have to be limited to networking, servers, and disk storage. A business may identify secondary vendors during its business continuity planning exercises if their primary vendor is unable to provide services.

A Fail-Over occurs when the primary equipment is switched over to a secondary one. Having a failover plan with redundant systems allows mission-critical systems and processes to continue without disruption in the event of an outage.

CIA, When creating a BC or DR plan, the following measurements are essential: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Access. It is important to identify how each component of the CIA triad can successfully recover or continue operations.

An organization's crisis communication plan should be well-developed and updated consistently in order to be able to respond as needed to both natural and man-made crises. Crises come in many shapes and sizes, from floods and pandemics to data theft and lawsuits. Crisis communication plans can help preserve your organization's brand, reputation, and credibility despite the fact that it is not possible to plan for every event. An important component of the plan is identifying who can communicate status to employees and who is the public spokesperson.

In order to optimize existing business continuity and data recovery arrangements, it is necessary to turn fundamental BC/DR systems into long-term business strategies.

It is imperative that you are willing and able to constantly assess your existing business continuity and data recovery environment to develop more comprehensive business strategies that utilize the access, insight, and structural awareness these modern data protection technologies provide.