Saturday, June 27, 2015

Business Continuity Plan versus Disaster Recovery Plan, or should they co-exist?

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes aim for organizations to be prepare for that one disruptive event that can take them out of business, even temporarily. In the context of this assay, it is related to event that can affect the IT systems, be it passive infrastructure (i.e caballing) or systems.

Often, when an organization deals with this subject they often discuss "DRP vs BCP", Disaster recovery or business continuity planning, what’s important, and what can be more cost effective. Most organizations that I'm familiar with takes the approach of " business continuity first, we will deal with the disaster when it will happen". That is why IT organization replicate their servers to a location name "DRP". You have live copy of the content, but will you be able to access it?
Should it was decided to replicate the content of the IT servers to secondary and tertiary sits (someone said cloud?) to allow smooth contingency. It is nice to have them available, but think of the ability to use them.

True story. Some day at 1999, arrived to the office early in the morning, just to find out that the northern wing of the management building was on fire. The first floor was burnt out to the ground (literally the floor fell down on to the ground floor). Unfortunately the Backbone switch was in that floor. Using the infrastructure on the south wing to connect the building back to the working campus network, people were able to return to their desks the following morning.


Having "hot and active" multiple datacenters, that is contingency plan. Having redundant "cold and passive" infrastructure, that is disaster recovery plan.

(Written as part of the Coursera based seminar "Cybersecurity and Its Ten Domains")

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