Disaster Recovery Planning

March 9, 2010

Are You Prepared For a Disaster?

Natural Disasters

Man-made Disasters

Both are unpredictable and potentially fatal to your business. Most businesses do not have written Disaster Recovery Plans that are comprehensive and tested, if they have one at all. Many of the companies that claim to have a Disaster Recovery plan merely have a data backup plan.

What is the Approach?

How do I decide where to start? If you have decided that you need to undertake a Disaster Recovery Planning initiative, either because your organization's current plan is inadequate or worse, non-existent, then you have taken the first step. Your next priority is to create an interim stop-gap plan until your enterprise-wide DR plan is complete. This will provide some level of protection in the event of a near-term disaster (think hurricane season).

What are the the steps? A well defined and executed Disaster Recovery Plan requires a considerable amount of investment in time, effort, and resources. Some of the key steps in the process include:

	Risk Assessment
	Business Impact Analysis
	Migration and Recovery Strategies
	Testing
	Training
	Auditing
	Plan Maintenance

Standards Based - Our processes are based on our experience as well as recognized industry standards and best practices including:

	BS25999 – British Standard for Business Continuity Management
	DRI - Disaster Recovery Institute
	NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology

Next Steps

At Concentric3 our experts can guide you through the entire Disaster Recovery Planning process.

Let us know how we can help

The U. S. Department of Labor estimates that over 40% of businesses never reopen following a disaster. Of the remaining companies, at least 25% will close within 2 years.

“Over 60% of businesses confronted by a major disaster close by two years”
(Assoc. of Records Managers & Administrators)

Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike slammed into the Texas coast in the early morning hours of September 13, 2008 and inflicted an estimated $22 billion in damage. Over 2.1 million customers in the Houston metro area, including both residential and business, were without power immediately after the storm passed. Some of these outages lasted 18 days. Could your business survive?