The Mystery of the Unknown

The mystery of unknown – by Dina Safar & Joseph Ghabi Your Work place is no longer available, disaster has struck, and time is money! How many times have you heard these statements? It is a nightmare for CIOs and IT directors to have to explain downtime to their CEO and CFO. For many CEOs and CFOs, what was important yesterday is no longer valid today. Too much concentration and spending has been invested into infrastructure of networking which opposes reality of today, that is more concentrated upon business availability and continuity. What would happen if your company had a small disaster that equals to big trouble? If something happens to workplace, then how much will it cost to recover lost data? What contingency plan does your company have? And finally, how much will all of above costs? This is not an example of psychic divination, it is a mere fact and we all experimented that after September 11th 2001. There are different variations to business continuity, which will all depend on to which extent is acceptable for a company to have a downtime. Is it two days, one hour or perhaps not even a mere 5 minutes? Does company need business continuity to extent of an off-site disaster recovery? Business continuity can be differentiated in two levels. 1-Business continuity where we secure and manage all risks, which may be brought about by technology failure. This includes human error, equipment failure, database corruption, hacking and various other external disasters.

2- Business continuity where we require an offsite backup (Disaster Recovery Site) to resume same level of productivity in case of workplace disruption. The disaster recovery (DR) planning deals with massive site failure whether it is complete or partial. Site failure is typically permanent consequence of broadly disruptive forces. Threats to businesses are more obvious today, however, they have always existed and they always will prevail. The event, which occurred on September 11, changed definition of crisis management plans since many companies had disaster recovery plans in place. However, very few had an off-site plan. A DR plan begins with evaluating vulnerabilities of an organization’s information technology assets. Your business may have done some work towards planning for a possible disaster but will it survive such circumstances? The next important step is to find out effect of a disaster on your business. How much money could you lose if IT systems are no longer available? How much money would it cost to recover your IT systems? The third step is to develop a disaster recovery strategy that fits your requirements in terms of cost and time. After strategy has been defined detailed work of ‘disaster recovery’ begins by implementing plan that will allow your business to survive any situation. Studies have shown that even best plan will not succeed if it has not been practiced and maintained. On a final note, a long-term program of testing and maintenance should be attempted to ensure that plan will work at any time.

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