Tutorial

ABC: An Introduction to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Good business continuity plans will keep your company up and running. This primer helps make sure you've covered all the bases.

Can you give me some examples of things companies have discovered through testing?

Some companies have discovered that while they back up their servers or data centers, they've overlooked backup plans for laptops. Many businesses fail to realize the importance of data stored locally on laptops. Because of their mobile nature, laptops can easily be lost or damaged. It doesn't take a catastrophic event to disrupt business if employees are carting critical or irreplaceable data around on laptops.

One company reports that it is looking into buying MREs (meals ready-to-eat) from the company that sells them to the military. MREs have a long shelf life, and they don't take up much space. If employees are stuck at your facility for a long time, this could prove a worthwhile investment.

Mike Hager, former head of information security and disaster recovery for OppenhiemerFunds, says 9/11 brought issues like these to light. Many companies, he said, were able to recover data, but had no plans for alternative work places. The World Trade Center had provided more than 20 million square feet of office space, and after Sept. 11th there was only 10 million square feet of office space available in Manhattan. The issue of where employees go immediately after a disaster and where they will be housed during recovery should be addressed before something happens, not after.

USAA discovered that while it had designated a nearby relocation area, the setup process for computers and phones took nearly two hours. During that time, employees were left standing outside in the hot Texas sun. Seeing the plan in action raised several questions that hadn't been fully addressed before: Was there a safer place to put those employees in the interim? How should USAA determine if or when employees could be allowed back in the building? How would thousands of people access their vehicle if their car keys were still sitting on their desk? And was there an alternate transportation plan if the company needed to send employees home?

What are the top mistakes that companies make in disaster recovery?

Hager and other experts note the following pitfalls:

1. Inadequate planning: Have you identified all critical systems, and do you have detailed plans to recover them to the current day? (Everybody thinks they know what they have on their networks, but most people don't really know how many servers they have, or how they're configured, or what applications reside on them-what services were running, what version of software or operating systems they were using. Asset management tools claim to do the trick here, but they often fail to capture important details about software revisions and so on.

2. Failure to bring the business into the planning and testing of your recovery efforts.

3. Failure to gain support from senior-level managers. The largest problems here are:

Not demonstrating the level of effort required for full recovery.
Not conducting a business impact analysis and addressing all gaps in your recovery model.
Not building adequate recovery plans that outline your recovery time objective, critical systems and applications, vital documents needed by the business, and business functions by building plans for operational activities to be continued after a disaster.
Not having proper funding that will allow for a minimum of semiannual testing.

I still have a binder with our Y2K contingency plan. Will that work?

Absolutely not (unless your computers, employees and business priorities are exactly the same as they were in 1999). Plus, most Y2K plans cover only computer system-based failure. Potential physical calamities like blackouts, natural disasters or terrorist events bring additional issues to the table.

Can we outsource our contingency measures?

Disaster recovery services-offsite data storage, mobile phone units, remote workstations and the like-are often outsourced, simply because it makes more sense than purchasing extra equipment or space that may never be used. In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, disaster recovery vendors restored systems and provided temporary office space, complete with telephones and Internet access for dozens of displaced companies.