It is essential to be prepared to know how to act in any situation — even the most chaotic and unexpected ones, capable of interrupting the operations of the companies we work for or the clients we serve.
In such cases, everyone wants the same thing: an agile response and the rapid resumption of activities. This is the role of the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) alongside the Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Read this article to better understand how BCP and DRP can be applied in your company.
What BCP and DRP Are
The role of the BCP is to list critical processes and ensure the continuity of an organization’s key activities in the most disastrous scenarios. Technology and digital tools increasingly play a central role within companies, regardless of their size or industry.
For this reason, issues such as damaged servers or a website outage can often directly affect profitability and business. Disasters can be caused by various reasons — ranging from hardware failures to natural catastrophes, such as storms and floods.
The variety of causes also leads to a wide range of consequences that can affect company operations to varying degrees, depending on each one’s key activities.
Continuity plans are developed differently according to each of the possible threats to the most relevant and critical operational processes, defining operational details for each security failure and the possible consequences in a disaster.
It is necessary to create planning according to the context and needs of each company. First, you must define your business priorities in case of an emergency. And in the DRP, through a step-by-step approach, align a flowchart with all the tasks that must be executed in order of importance for the continuity of key activities.
Prioritize major needs and program in the Disaster Recovery Plan what actions are necessary to ensure business continuity even in disastrous scenarios. These are your “mission-critical functions.” Also identify which tasks efforts will be allocated to, whether internally or to meet customer demands.
The DRP must be formed as a step-by-step guide of what to do in crisis scenarios — a guide of what needs to be done and by whom. List the tasks according to their importance for the continuity of business-critical functions.
However, all share the same primary objective: to ensure the continuity of core operations, regardless of the context. This is the central role of a Business Continuity Plan.
All fragile points and potential crisis focus areas that could affect operational continuity must be listed — even those that seem least likely to happen.
The more threats to operational continuity you and your team can imagine, the more efficient the BCP will be. List the different threats to the continuity of your company’s key activities and how to avoid them according to priority.
It is important that the Business Continuity Plan provides for different solutions to the same problem — even those that seem most obvious or unlikely. It needs to anticipate — or come as close as possible to anticipating — all hypotheses and consequences of a problem.
The Role of the Business Continuity Plan and the Disaster Recovery Plan
The focus of a BCP should be the non-interruption of key activities. In the Disaster Recovery Plan, on the other hand, the focus is on solutions that ensure the continuity and restoration of services as quickly as possible.
The total resumption of services and their normalization should be the focus in a second moment, when the Disaster Recovery Plan is applied. Of course, in an ideal scenario, applying the BCP already eliminates the need to activate a DRP document, but this will not always be possible.
The complete resolution of the problem — as well as its consequences — must be addressed in the Disaster Recovery Plan.
Who Should Be Responsible for Applying the Disaster Recovery Plan?
Communication failure can be more common than we would like to imagine in times of crisis and can greatly affect the normalization of operations.
Ideally, all stages should have as their focal point a committee formed by employees with different expertise previously selected to be responsible for applying the DRP during an incident.
An alternative if forming a team is not possible is to create a single focal point, where one employee serves as a reference for the rest of the team. It is important to centralize the distribution of demands and control the operation — as this prevents energy and time from being wasted on inefficient or redundant actions.
Maintaining focus and productivity is even more important when we talk about operational continuity — after all, it is in everyone’s interest that operations continue and that the company does not suffer from losses and dissatisfied clients/users.
Which Processes Must Be Documented in a Business Continuity Plan
A well-structured BCP should include the following points:
- documenting the company’s priorities and responsibilities;
- checking the main and potential risks to operational continuity;
- defining who is part of the committee responsible for managing the Disaster Recovery Plan and who should be contacted if necessary.
The idea of having documented planning is precisely to prevent important decisions from being made on impulse or important procedures from being ignored. Planning what to do in crises that have not even happened yet must be seen as a preventive and necessary measure for the proper functioning of a company.
Being prepared for the most adverse situations is one of the distinguishing qualities of a good IT leader. In the middle of a bad scenario, stress and anxiety levels caused by problems often prevent us from seeing the best solutions.
Anticipating potential problems and main solutions is, therefore, a way to protect oneself and ensure agility and delivery levels even in disaster situations.
We hope the role of each of these plans has become clear to you. With the market increasingly competitive and technology taking a central role in business, no company can afford to be without IT services.
So? Did you have any questions? Would you like to add any information? Leave a comment and we will respond promptly!
