REASONS YOU MAY NEED A CONTINUITY AUDIT

  • 4 out of 5 businesses do not know what disaster recovery encompasses.
  • Most businesses do not know what systems need to protection.
  • Inability to estimate how long would it take your business to recover.

EXAMPLE OF A CONTINUITY PLAN

How often do you think about backing up your computer? Now how often do you think about disaster recovery and business continuity. While backing up your data is important, what would you do in the event of a data disaster. Then ask yourself what should I be trying to protect against to mitigate loss.

What is the different between backing up and being able to recover?

A Backup is copy of your data; it could be files, images, documents, or even programs such as Microsoft Exchange. Backups can be stored on removable media drives, cloud based storage, external drives or on the desktop. However this type of backup rarely involves the entire server or computer.

Business Continutiy, on the other hand, is the ability to recover the entire system after a failure.
The most prominent difference between a simple backup and and disaster recovery plan is the the amount of potential time the recovery will take or whether it will even be possible. With a disaster recovery plan, there is a business continuity factor implement allowing an estimate of the recovery time after different types of disasters. A planned disaster recovery strategy will have a turn around time measured in minutes, instead of hours or day.

The information put out nowadays regarding the differences between disaster recovery and backups can be convoluted depending upon how much the receiver of the information has knowledge on.

Some reasons for this are:

  • It costs less to have a backup software on multiple machines or for multiple users. Business believe that files are all that is needed to get back up and going often times.
  • Backups can be done in the background and are out of site and out of mind. Businesses tend to minimize the importance of the desk machines versus the servers.
  • Backup is still NOT Disaster Recovery. Why?
  • The Recovery Point Objectives are still considerably higher than that of a true Disaster Recovery solution, and The Recovery Time Objective is longer than any Disaster Recovery solution as you always have to restore to a different medium, so you’ll always have the restoration time, as well as in most cases the need to procure the hardware to restore to.
  • There will always be a chance that the data backups will not bring everything back to full functionality and greater loss both in time and finances could occur.