BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY (BCDR)

In today's environment, especially in changing weather conditions pose severe threat to Business continuity. Not only, weather conditions but also hardware failure, virus attack plays havoc in business continuity. What needs to be done in this kind of situation? To have uninterrupted business continuity, proper Disaster Recovery (DR) plan should be in place. There are few questions to be asked before planning for DR.

1.  Is sufficient infrastructure in place for recovery of data if Disaster occurs?

2.  How much time will recovery take, when a disaster is declared?

3.  How much data will be lost while doing the recovery process?

4.  Is our mission-critical data is safe in the event of disaster?

The Two key points to be considered are:

Recovery time objective (RTO) :- the amount of time between an outage and restoration of operations.

Recovery point objective (RPO) :- the point in time where data is restored and reflects the amount of data that will be ultimately lost during the recovery process.

There are different models of disaster recovery.

In a dedicated model, the infrastructure is dedicated to single organization. IT infrastructure is mirrored at the disaster recover site and is ready to be called upon in the event of disaster.

In a shared recovery model, the infrastructure is shared among multiple organizations in other words cloud based recovery.

Normally in a dedicated recovery model, recovery is much faster than the shared model.

It is up to the organisation to choose the recovery model based upon their need. Normally it is trade-off between cost and speed.

It is better to seek the advice of business continuity specialist when planning for DR.