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Disaster Recovery Planning for Web Sites
Why Plan for Disaster Recovery?
The simple answer is if you don’t you may be in for a nasty surprise. The fact is there are many good reasons why you should plan:
- You may be required by law to set up a Disaster Recovery Plan;
- Your business may fail if you do not properly plan how to recover from disaster;
- Proper planning protects your directors from liability and your investors from financial loss; and
- Disasters happen. They are a very real risk to the operation of your business.
A business that is unprepared for a disaster will be struck down hard if one strikes. For example:
- Some 70% of businesses fail within a year following a major IT disaster, if they do not have a valid recovery plan in place;
- Of those that do survive only 10% make a full recovery; and
- Without a plan, recovery is slower resulting in loss of customers, sales revenue and shareholder confidence.
Where Do You Start?
So you know you have to do something to plan for the recovery of your firm in case disaster strikes, but where to start?
First of all, recognize that a good Disaster Recovery Plan is intended to help your company survive a disaster and get back to business in a reasonable time. This means that the goals of your Plan should be to:
- Identify where the weaknesses are and set up a program to try and prevent them;
- Minimize the length of time that business operations would be seriously disrupted;
- Help to co-ordinate all the recovery tasks; and
- Make the recovery effort as uncomplicated as possible.
Secondly, use proper strategies to help you develop a Plan that works. Emphasize the following:
- Ensure management knows that a total effort is needed to develop and maintain an effective plan;
- In addition, management must be committed to supporting and taking part in this effort;
- Define your recovery requirements in terms of business functions;
- Document the impact of an extended loss of operations and key business functions;
- Focus on preventing a disaster and minimizing its impact as well as business recovery;
- Select teams that will give you the balance needed to develop a proper plan;
- Develop a continuity plan that is easy to develop and easy to maintain; and
- Define how to integrate continuity planning issues into ongoing business planning and system development processes to ensure the plan is viable over time.
Remember that senior personnel from Information Systems and user areas must be involved to make the planning process work.
Finally, use the right tools for the job. This will help you to cover all contingencies as much as possible and minimize the impact of a disaster on your company.
Disaster Recovery Planning for Web Sites
You don't have to be a major e-commerce site to be concerned about your potential for a web site disaster.
Even if you outsource your entire web hosting, you are still open for business in all of the meanest streets in all of the meanest cities in the world.
You still have to worry about hackers, fradusters, software failure, theft of customer information, supplier failure, and numerous other risks that can lead to financial losses, business interruption, and damage to your reputation.
Have you considered all of the risks? And are your procedures up to the challenge?
If not, contact 540 Interactive today to find out what you can do, and how we can help.
