While a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan is crucial for ensuring that organizations can recover their Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and data after a disruption, it is not enough on their own. A DR Plan needs to be part of a larger Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for the organization.
Traditional DRs are crucial for IT departments on how to recover from disruptions such as a data center or service provider outage, cybersecurity compromise or server outage. But they are limited in focus, as they don’t include procedures and information needed for other business units (HR, Payroll, Manufacturing, etc.) to recover from a disruption (supply chain, mother nature, etc.) that may affect them.
Even an IT disruption can affect other business units. For instance, if Payroll requires access to an application hosted in IT’s data center and that application becomes unavailable, how does Payroll continue to operate? What is their recovery process or alternate procedure to continue running payroll while IT restores access to the application.
That is why organizations should also have complete and detailed BCP’s in place for your other business units. This will ensure that there are procedures in place on how to quickly recover from disruptions that may affect them. This will minimize downtime and potential negative finance or reputation effects. BCP’s addresses all aspects of a business, ensuring continuity of critical functions even when the IT infrastructure is down. BCP’s include operations like customer service, HR, supply chain, and finance, which may not be directly related to IT systems but are essential for keeping the business running smoothly.
BCP also ensures there is a broader approach to managing the entire crisis, such as employee safety, communication strategies, and recovery of core business processes.
While DR ensures the IT systems are back online quickly, BCP outlines how to keep the organization functioning during prolonged disruptions, ensuring that long-term resilience is built into every layer of the business. This includes adapting to new circumstances, addressing financial impacts, maintaining customer relations, and ensuring business growth can continue even after a significant event.
A DR Plan is essential for the technical side of recovery, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. A Business Continuity Plan ensures that an organization can continue functioning, even when disaster strikes.
To summarize:
- DR Plan = IT recovery
- BCP = Entire business survival
When creating a plan, whether a DR or a BCP, to ensure it is effective, there’s several things you should ensure you have and are doing.
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Conduct a BIA to help identify and prioritize critical business functions, processes and systems. A BIA will help you with understanding the financial, operational and reputational impacts of disruptions, which allows you to allocate resources effectively and prioritize recovery.
- Plan Owner: Have a dedicated person who is responsible for every individual plan
- Constant Review: All plans should be reviewed at least once a year to ensure they are accurate. Any updates should be made at that time.
- Plan Reviewers: Each plan should have at least one person who is responsible for reviewing the plan to ensure its accuracy and completeness based on a review cycle.
- Defined Roles and Responsibilities: All plans should clearly assign roles and responsibilities for every individual or teams for each phase of the DR or BCP plan, including recovery.
- Communication Plan: Establish clear communication channels for internal (employees) and external stakeholders (suppliers, vendors, customers). What mechanism to use and who does the communicating and to whom. Having effective communication is critical for managing a disruption in keeping all parties informed about the disruption and recovery progress and needs.
- Training: All employees, whether for existing or for new hires, should be trained and refreshed in their groups’ plans. For new hires, this can be part of their onboarding process. Training allows everyone to know what they need to do in the event a plan is activated. This minimizes recovery delays.
- Tabletop Exercises or Tests: Tabletop exercises or plan tests should be routinely conducted, at the very least, once a year, of either parts or the plan or entire plan. This allows you to flush out any issues with the procedures or personnel and correct them as well as ensuring those that need to participate in the plan know what they need to do.
- Documentation and Accessibility: All plans, procedures and contact information are thoroughly documented and easily accessible to all team members, especially in a crisis. This also ensures that the response is efficient and consistent, especially when key personnel are unavailable, and others have to step in.
