Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Bookstore Bestsellers

Principles and Practice of Business Continuity
This new book explores the subject of Business Continuity Management: from basic principles to best practices. More...

Business Continuity and Risk Management
The First Ever College Textbook on Business Continuity and Risk Management — also a great reference source and self-study guide for business continuity practitioners and novices! More...

Emergency Management Exercises: From Response to Recovery Special
Exercises are a mainstay in the field of emergency management and business continuity planning. Although many companies conduct exercises, and the organizers may be emergency response subject matter experts, they do not excel in the discipline of designing and conducting the actual exercise – which means they simply don’t get the best results out of their effort. More...

Disaster Recovery Testing
Untested contingency / recovery plans are of little value. Testing is far more than finding holes in the plan: it confirms the underlying assumptions are workable; it can also be a valuable training tool. More...

Facility Emergency Management DVD-based training
Facility Emergency Management is a brand new DVD-based Training Program PLUS a resource CD-ROM intended to help small and medium size organizations create facility action plans and institute emergency procedures in order to protect workers, customers, visitors and the nearby community from the effects of an incident, whether it begins inside or outside the facility. More...

Manufacturing, Distribution Business Continuity
A new Business Continuity template specifically designed for manufacturing or distribution businesses with 1,150+ pages on CD-ROM. More...

Business disaster recovery planning: How much is enough DR planning?

Written by Phil on December 1, 2010 in Disaster Recovery.

Having a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place is essential to restore an IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. But how much DR planning is enough? This tip offers some insight as to where the line should be drawn to avoid over-planning.

In business disaster recovery planning, a DR plan is created so that when a disaster strikes, critical business processes can still run. If a disaster strikes and you have no business DR plan, people scramble to remember how systems were configured. The interruption of critical business processes creates pressure to restart activity as quickly as possible to minimize the financial and/or public opinion impact on the company.

But without clearly defined procedures, recovery time can be unnecessarily delayed and very costly. At the same time, not all applications and IT systems support critical business functions. Without trying to oversimplify, IT systems can be divided between critical, useful and nice-to-have. Critical systems are the focal point when planning for recovery; you can get around to recovering useful components once pressure starts easing a little and eventually you can take care of the nice-to-have applications once you have a functional IT environment

See Business disaster recovery planning: How much is enough DR planning? by Pierre Dorion for SearchDisasterRecovery.com.