Investing scarce time and resources in disaster recovery planning is a tough sell for smaller business -- it's more appealing to hope disaster won't strike. But rather than ignoring it, IT professionals should view disaster recovery as one aspect of business continuity management and collaborate with the business to plan for the inevitable rainy day.
Adapted from an Info-Tech Research Group McLean Report Research Note:
"Draw the Line Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity," published April 22, 2008.
Smaller businesses often view disaster recovery planning (DRP) as the IT equivalent of a high-cost insurance policy they'll never redeem. That makes building a business case for DRP difficult at the best of times. Given the gloomy economic outlook for 2008/2009, IT departments everywhere are cutting or postponing projects. But for IT departments still moving ahead with DRP projects, understanding the distinction between DRP and business continuity planning (BCP) will keep the disaster recovery work on budget and on track.
DRP vs. BCP: Who Owns What?
Who bears responsibility for continuity and recovery is often a question for smaller businesses. Strictly speaking, best practices dictate that IT be accountable for DRP, while the business at large assumes responsibility for BCP. However, confusion reigns when neither IT nor the business understand what DRP and BCP actually are or the distinction between them.
A smaller businesses ability to identify, quantify, and mitigate risk lies at the heart of any recovery or continuity initiative. A fundamental awareness of risk, combined with a razor-sharp knowledge of how risk impacts critical business processes, are key to developing a comprehensive disaster recovery or business continuity plan. When risk and business impact are misinterpreted or miscommunicated, many problems arise:
- Lack of unified incident response across the organization.
- Failure to achieve consensus on standardized recovery processes.
- Incomplete or nonexistent risk assessments, assumptions, and objectives.
- Insufficient communication plans to coordinate recovery/continuity efforts.
- Inability to recover data and applications.
Business Continuity: A Framework
As demonstrated in the following diagram, DRP is simply a subset of the broader discipline that is business continuity management. While the DRP addresses the IT element of continuity (e.g., data, application, and infrastructure recovery), a business continuity plan incorporates organizational and human resources issues such as communications plans and crisis management.
Next Page: Ways To Manage Business Continuity
