Disaster Recovery for the Small to Medium-sized Business

Written by Michelle Kirk - March 28, 2007

Due to the impact of recent large-scale disasters, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Management (BCM) have come into the forefront of business planning. Because of this, and also because of the large role electronic document management, CRM and Workflow can play in reducing the costs of Disaster Recovery, FileVision will publish a series of articles on these topics.

In this installment, we will define exactly what Disaster Recover and BCM are, and how important they are for any organization, regardless of size.

Disaster Recovery essentially involves going back to a previous state and recovering information and services that have been somehow interrupted.

In a disaster scenario, a business may be affected in several areas of their infrastructure. Each of these areas must be recovered. Examples are endless and can include damage to:

• paper
• physical security/infrastructure
• essential human resources
• email
• databases
• data networking
• applications

Disaster recover plan design is based upon the premise that interruption of your business is a real risk, and that you will need to recover what is lost if a disaster occurs. Planning ahead and reducing the amount of and degree of difficult in recovering these essentials are all part of good disaster preparedness.

Business Continuity refers to planning for ongoing availability of essential systems and services. It is generally a "24x7" plan in which an organization attempts to maintain business operations regardless of any negative event, and keep certain segments of its application infrastructure in place regardless of what is happening in others. Therefore, when the term Business Continuity is used, it generally refers to electronic-based infrastructure, and the design which keeps this segment of a business up and running in any foreseeable situation. In Business Continuity, there is generally no need to recover data due to an outage because there are redundancies in place to make up for failure at a specific point.

Because they are different, but related, these two terms are often used together as the term Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR), but independently their meanings are quite different.

Surprisingly, budgets for disaster recovery planning continue to account for only a small percentage of overall technology costs for businesses. In its U.S. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: 2001-2006 Focus Report published in March 2003, the Gartner Group estimates that small companies with 10 to 100 employees spend under .5% of their IT budgets on BCDR. Large companies spend only a fraction more. According to many analysts, most small to medium businesses (SMBs) have no formal Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plans. They tend to rely on in-house backup strategies to safeguard their critical data.

Many people think of backup as synonymous with BCDR. But backup is only one area of BCDR activities in which an organization can engage. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery span a number of activities, services, and technologies. The extent to which an organization plans disaster recovery is individual to the organization itself. It is dependent upon where, how, how much, and what types of essential information the organization retrains. It doesn't always require a lot of cost to implement, but evaluation and planning are crucial.

In the next installment, we will discuss evaluation of organization information, and what types of information are essential to recover should your business experience a disaster.