Archive for the ‘Continuity Disaster Recovery’ Category
May 4th, 2011 | 
Author: Disasters and other business disruptions are not uncommon, unfortunately, and most managers are surprised by this. Fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes are frequent events throughout parts of the US and beyond – and these are just the naturally occurring events. Add to these human errors, accidents, and power outages and the likelihood for a business related disaster is fairly high.
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A managed services provider is a company that manages services for another company. Basically, they are a company that takes care of outsourced services on a month-to-month basis, which is how they also receive their income. Many of these services are provided via the internet and cover such tasks as IT services, remote data backup, desktop and security monitoring, and technical assistance. It is also common for a managed services provider to also manage a company’s web hosting and maintenance of their websites.
The UK’s Records Management Society defines records management as, “the process by which a company manages all the elements of records whether externally or internally generated and in any format or media type, from their inception/receipt, all the way through to their disposal”. In this digital age many organisations have set up comprehensive systems to ensure that electronic records are safely stored and backed up, with a plan in place should an unexpected crisis occur. This makes a great deal of sense since some estimates suggest that over 90% of businesses that have had a major data processing disaster will go out of business within 5 years.
The best laid schemes of mice and men is a phrase originating from a Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’ written in1786. The poem is an apology from the author to the mouse for accidentally upturning the mouses’ nest while ploughing a field. And the phrase itself is colloquially used to describe that even the most careful planning can be undone by unexpected circumstances or events.
As the business world becomes more dependent on technology, there are number of precautions they have to take in order to protect their operations. When it comes to business computer systems, preparations have to be implemented in the event an incident occurs that puts data at risk of permanent loss due to an unexpected disaster.
The Importance of Business Continuity Planning
Business Continuity Planning can offer protection from many potential risks that can threaten your company by disrupting critical business processes. These risks include traditional disasters like earthquakes, fires, floods, and tornados, as well as risks from terrorism (both physical and cyberterrorism), cybercrime, computer failures, theft and employee sabotage. Any one of these events can be extremely disruptive and detrimental to your business, yet all of the potential damage from each of them can be substantially minimized through business continuity management.
In the risk evaluation phase, some main areas need to be covered. An important thing would be to understand any probable threats. Probably in an ideal world, which we know do not exist, we might be able to identify and protect ourselves from all threats to be able to ensure that our business would be able to continue surviving. We are obviously held back by the other factors like time, budget and priorities and we need to apply some kind of cost benefit analysis so that we could make sure that we are able to protect the most important business functions. Clearly, the same impact could result from different threats.
VALUE of INFORMATION
To ensure continuity (going concern) we make use of many resources. The unavailability or impairment of some resources will threaten continuity and affect our chances of success and sometimes our chances of survival. One of these important/critical resources is information.
Has it ever happened to you that your management has given you the responsibility to implement business continuity (BC) just because you are in the IT department? Why is BC usually identified with information technology?
It goes without saying that there isn’t a single business around who doesn’t need disaster recovery services. Your data is one of the most important parts of your business. Do you have a well laid out and sound plan of attack in mind to be used in the event of a disaster in your business?