Disaster Recovery Preparedness, Research Paper Example

Disaster Recovery is one of the important functions for ensuring business continuity within an organization. Likewise, the disaster recovery plan focuses on Information Technology resources and configuration. Whereas, business continuity plan focuses on prioritizing business processes. Similarly both of these plans support each other in a state of a disaster. For ensuring an efficient recovery, different locations are used for replicating services, network infrastructure, hardware infrastructure and application infrastructure. Likewise, these locations are divided in to different type i.e. hot site, warm site and cold site.

Hot sites are the most expensive, as they are completely replicated to the original site. For instance, online remittances requires 24/7 system availability, as they come from different regions of the world. If these remittances are not received, customer may suffer and the bank reputation will also be on stake. Moreover, cost/benefit analysis may simplify, whether a hot site is required for this particular business process. Likewise, hot site will be best suited for this type of scenario, where hot site will play its role, once the primary infrastructure is not available due to disaster.

Similarly, warm sites are not fully replicated as compared to the hot site. There is no data backup on warm sites, only hardware and application infrastructure is available (Phillips, 2011). Again, it depends on the nature of the business. For instance, if account opening system of the bank is not available, it can be made operational at the warn site within 24 hours or more. In general, bank takes time to open a customer bank account and the time will not be an issue for this particular business process. Moreover, the cost of this particular process will identify the requirements of keeping it on the warm site or the hot site.

Furthermore, cold site is the least expensive, as hardware, network and application infrastructure is not present. Only physical facility exists and required infrastructure is arranged as per business requirements. For instance, payroll system is not available and the date is March 6, 2013. The date indicates that the salary of employee is already processed and there is a lot of time for arranging a physical facility to setup the payroll system. In this scenario, cold site can be used.

After developing the business continuity and disaster recovery plans, testing is essential. These plans must be tested to ensure its validity and alignment with business process, such as recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives must be met in BCP drills. However, prior to the BCP drills, a comprehensive training program should be developed. Testing reports identifies weaknesses and areas of improvement in the disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Likewise, these changes are modified and updated in the document, as well as on information systems (Sandhu & NIIT, 2002). It is recommended that at least once in a year these plans must be tested in order to assure their compliance with the business requirements and the ever changing Information technology infrastructure.

For relating the sites with the banking sector, regulators impose BCP/DR plans as mandatory, as it is the public serving sector that may put impact on the overall banking industry, if customer services and personal data is mishandled. Banking sector may require hot sites for mission critical information such as bank account details. Secondly, a software house may require a warm site, as source codes needs to be replicated, as developers can than resume their services from the warn sites, depending on the situation and business requirements.

References

Phillips, B. (2011). Disaster recovery Taylor & Francis.

Sandhu, R. J., & NIIT, (. (2002). Disaster recovery planning Premier Press.