BUSINESS CONTINGENCY PLAN

Business Contingency Plan



Business Contingency Plan

 

Introduction

A key step in developing a comprehensive and effective disaster recovery plan is to find an off-site location to store backup media and other vital content. This is a critical requirement to support and effective business continuity plan. This is normally accomplished by providing physical storage and rotation plan of system/application backup media such as tape, DVD, CD and USB drivers. Offsite data backup works by first encrypting the data, then compressing and transmitting it to an offsite security center. This data can then be accessed in the event of an emergency by using either the Internet or another data restore line. Off-site data protection is most commonly used to prevent data loss as a result of natural disasters or hardware failure. In this case, the data are stored at the original location and at an off-site location. In the event of a loss of data on-site, the off-site data can be used to recover the data. The storage of off-site data is also known as vaulting, as backups are stored in purpose built vaults.

Assumptions aimed at prevention could be: to establish backup policies appropriate to the information discussed in the company, control of network traffic, strict update servers and other software, register accesses to restricted areas, control of virus and malware, etc..

Discussion & Analyses

Creating a mirrored copy of an entire data center is the most effective way to ensure business continuity. Information stored online should be replicated and stored on another server to prevent data loss and aid business continuity. With replication and redundancy, a company installs a mirror image data center, either at a separate location or co-located within the facility. Server and router switches are clustered at both the primary and secondary sites. This allows the primary site to continue to operate even if a server fails. Data needs to be protected at both sites with strong security. The benefit to replication of data over multiple locations is that it provides no single point of failure. So if the primary location server ceases to function due to attack or natural disaster, information is readily available from the other servers.

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events. Today's world of E-Commerce means that it is essential for businesses to have some form of business continuity planning and disaster recovery solution in place. Companies must develop a solution to provide continuous availability of their systems, or risk losing business to their competitors (Dhillon, 2007).

If server storage hardware is corrupted due to a disaster situation, data becomes inaccessible. Therefore, the importance of information backup is apparent.

If the company uses a database that allows you to copy files to another machine remotely, one should absolutely take advantage of this opportunity. To synchronize data, one can use a VPN connection and software such as CA XOsoft WANSync. The backup location, you can keep a full copy of the database or few files. The solution depends on the assumptions in the contingency ...