Today’s world provides so many enabling technologies for enabling an efficient and effective BC / DR plan in place. Enterprises can no longer justify not having a working and effective BC / DR plans in place.
The coming of the Cloud is a tremendous help for BC/DR planning. You have a safe repository of all your important information physically separate from your physical operations. Even if your whole building becomes inaccessible through fire, flood, or terrorism, the data, applications, and knowledge stored in the cloud remain untouched, completely unaware that something has occurred. It is just there waiting for you to access it from wherever you are. No time or effort or cost need to be spend recreating hardware and infrastructure.
The BC / DR plans themselves that used to be kept in physical paper files can now be stored in electronic format, immediately accessible and available through different channels and devices. In electronic format, it becomes easy to update and keep current, easy to disseminate and and ensure that everyone has the latest version, and very importantly, easy to access when needed.
Copies of the plans can be kept in secure thumb drives at the homes of key employees.
When disaster strikes, the ubiquity of handheld smart devices allow employees to be easily advised, easily contacted, and potentially able to work from anywhere.
For a web-based central platform for reporting and keeping track of what’s going on, you can also put up a wiki platform that key personnel can readily update as information and progress occur. A wiki software you can use is Mediawiki. This is the same software that Wikipedia runs on.
Tools for automating the DR testing make coming up with working plans far easier. Solutions like VirtualSharp or Sanovi can help here.
BC / DR solutions need to go all the way to recovery. Many cloud solutions merely back up your data and applications. This is much better than nothing, but it is not enough. You also need to restore the data and applications into a state suitable to continue doing business. Plain backups do not help in adhering to RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) set for critical processes and data.
A lot of these tools were not around ten years ago. Failure to take advantage of them is almost criminal.
