Business Continuity: Are You Destined to React or Prepared to Respond?
by: Ben Thornton, Senior Business Continuity Consultant
The Relationship Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
DISASTER RECOVERY (“DR”) – the mere mention of the term conjures up images of the aftermath of the catastrophic events of 9-11, the 2003 New York Blackout, and Hurricane Katrina. From a business perspective, a disaster recovery plan means one thing – the ability of a business to recover and restore the functionality of its information infrastructure following a disaster.
Consider this scenario: The phone rings on a Saturday night. A crisis has just occurred, and your business is in jeopardy. Are you destined to react to this crisis or are you prepared to respond to it? The difference between merely reacting to a crisis versus responding to it lies in the planning. To react is to determine a course of action at the worst possible time – during the crisis, with no pre-thought out disaster recovery plan or processes in place; to respond implies a well-organized, planned solution that simply requires execution. This whitepaper is designed to show you how to effectively respond to crisis situations versus just reacting to them.
React vs. Respond: To simply react to a crisis is to attempt to construct a course of action on the fly; to respond implies a well-organized, planned solution.
Clearly, pre-planning a recovery strategy is critical to a business’s ability to respond to a disaster situation. But while the majority of disaster recovery plan providers focus on the “assets” that make up the IT infrastructure – such as servers, applications, databases, and networks – few take into account the business process end of disaster recovery, which ensures the all-important ability to maintain business continuity.
