Any organization where data plays a crucial role is vulnerable to business continuity interruption.
This includes every kind of organization from national retailers to sprawling government agencies and the military.
When data centers fail, catastrophe may follow. Business downtown can cost upward of $10,000 per minute, not to mention the inability to deliver services to its users.
It’s generally believed, the best disaster recovery plans (DRP) involve a comprehensive roadmap that covers a wide range of threats from natural disasters to cyber-attacks. One recommended element of a disaster recovery plan is the creation of a disaster recovery team.
This team typically is responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the DRP. A DRP should identify the team members, define each member’s responsibilities, and provide their contact information. The DRP should also identify who should be contacted in the event of a disaster or emergency. All employees should be informed of and understand the DRP and their responsibility if a disaster occurs.
Another important element of a DRP is to identify and assess disaster risk. Your disaster recovery team should identify and assess the risks to your organization. This step should include items related to natural disasters, man-made emergencies, and technology related incidents. This will assist the team in identifying the recovery strategies and resources required to recover from disasters within a predetermined and acceptable timeframe.
It’s also crucial to specify backup and off-site storage procedure that can identify what to back up, by whom, how to perform the backup, location of backup and how frequently backups should occur.
All critical applications, equipment, and documents should be backed up. Documents that you should consider backing up are the latest financial statements, tax returns, a current list of employees and their contact information, inventory records, customer and vendor listings. Critical supplies required for daily operations, such as checks and purchase orders, as well as a copy of the DRP, should be stored at an off-site location.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Training, a 2-day course that helps participants understand a variety of topics in disaster recovery and business continuity such as: introduction to disaster recovery, concept of disasters, introduction to business continuity, disaster recovery processing plans, risk management techniques, facility protection during disaster recovery period, data/system recovery, incident response and public service effect in a disaster recovery plan.
Additionally, Tonex offers nearly three dozen more courses in Cybersecurity Foundation. This includes cutting edge courses like:
—Cybersecurity Fundamentals (2 days)
—Electric Grid Cybersecurity Master Certification (4 weeks)
—Network Security Training (2 days)
—Software Security Training (2 days)
—ICS Cybersecurity Training (4 days)
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.