DR Planning

Every business, both small and large can experience a serious incident that can prevent them from continuing normal operations. This can range from a flood or fire to a serious IT incident.

CMS work closely with the senior management teams of our customers, as they have a responsibility to recover from major incidents with the minimum amount of down-time, disruption to the business and cost, often because of compliance issues related to their industry or sector. This requires careful preparation and planning.

It is vital that the organisation takes the development and maintenance of the disaster recovery or business continuity plan seriously. It is all too easy for organisations to put off maintaining these plans because of time and resource issues, only to encounter a serious problem and have no ability to continue conducting their business.

Writing and testing a disaster recovery plan is one of the key elements of business continuity management. Traditionally business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning have always been separated between the business and the information technology department. It has long been recognised that this ‘divide’ creates more problems than it solves, after all most businesses could not continue to operate successfully if their IT services were unavailable for a period of time, depending on the nature of your business this may well range from a few hours to several days. Essentially the key message is to have true business continuity you must also have strong IT DR capability.

A disaster recovery plan should interface with the overall business continuity management plan, be clear and concise, focus on the key activities required to recover the critical IT services, be tested reviewed and updated on a regular basis, have an owner, and enable the recovery objectives to be met.