Evolving a disaster recovery plan into a business continuity plan

Session Synopsis

So you have a disaster recovery plan.  It covers how to recover data and IT services in the event of failure of your IT systems, or does it?

Have the plans been tested to ensure that they will actually work in the event of a disruption?  Maybe you have undertaken some test restores to ensure validity of the data, or maybe you haven’t.  Who decided what information and servers were defined as critical?  Do the users of the systems share your priorities for recovery?  How useful are your disaster recovery plans if the IT staff are not a round to activate them?

All these questions may be answered in your plans, but the chances are they haven’t.  By adopting a business continuity approach to not just IT but the entirety of the business, the answers to these questions will be provided and the focus will be moved from recovery to proactively evaluating threats, minimise risks and focusing recovery on what the business agrees are its mission critical activities.

The obvious key outputs from this process are the business continuity, incident management and business recovery plans.  However, extremely valuable information pertaining to the entire organisation will be generated such as business activities/ processes and their associated criticality whether measured in financial, operational or reputational terms. 

Graham McKay guides visitors through the process and delivers tips on saving resource, reducing costs,aligning your IT disaster recovery plans with best practice and of course, engaging other users.