Business Adversity And Disaster Recovery Planning

Business Adversity And Disaster Recovery Planning

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.

Most Information Technology professionals today would be familiar with this phrase or a similar variation. Why? Because Information Technology projects can be large and complex making them susceptible to unexpected problems. It has certainly been my experience that most large projects and organizations factor for the best laid schemes of mice and men' variable in their change management and risk management practices.

But even the security offered by change management, risk management, backups and redundancy is not enough these days for many organizations that stake their survival on online services or transactions. This is primarily because backups and redundancy are usually designed to cater for a single component failure. For example, if a network link drops then a secondary link takes over. But what happens if multiple components fail at once due to a natural disaster, sabotage, security incident, health related outbreak or core services failure?

The result from such a catastrophic failure can be devastating to a business, especially if there has been no planning on how to restore what took years to build up in just a few short hours or days.

This type of planning is the domain of Disaster Recovery (DR) plans. Even the most stable and well designed networks are not immune to the aforementioned risks and many businesses mitigate this risk through the creation, implementation and testing of disaster recovery planning.

DR plans should cover as many aspects of service restoration as possible. This includes but is not limited to;

The absence of key personnel

A communication plan

A risk assessment

Technical tools

Key contact details

Procedures.

Most importantly, DR plans are a living document. That is they are never complete due to the fact that the business environment around them changes and those changes have to be reflected back into the plan in order to keep it up to date and effective.

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