business continuity planning for small and medium sized businesses
BCP is the blueprint for how businesses plan to survive everything from local equipment failure to global disaster. Data-oriented BCP, an indispensable component of business planning regardless of organization size, poses the following challenges.
Smaller businesses generally lack the in-house IT resources to achieve these demanding planning, technical and process requirements. Therefore, many SMB's either neglect to implement any data-oriented business continuity plan or else approach data backup and recovery in a sporadic, rudimentary fashion that fails to conform to the best practices of BCP.
Understanding the risks of not having a plan in place:
- Understanding Regulatory Compliance requirements in your industry. Regulations such as the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and other laws- state and federal.
- Understanding how to mitigate the risk of losing vital business data, such as customer records.
- Being aware of the environmental hazards that the business infrastructure is exposed to due to your geographical location.
- Estimating time it would take to build the business back if disaster strikes without having any BCP in place.
- Understanding ROI for having a BCP in place.
Technical Challenges:
- Identify the lowest-cost, highest-performance data backup medium (tape or disk) based solution and keeping abreast with the latest and greatest in the industry.
- Ensure that all backed-up data is encrypted and otherwise safeguarded from theft.
- Ensure that backed-up data can be restored to different kinds of hardware.
- Ensure that data backup continues even during active recovery phases.
Operational Challenges:
- Identifying what data to back up.
- Identifying how frequently to back up and related costs and ROI.
- Retain the ability to recover not only the most recent data, but also data from older time horizons, such as past quarters and years.
- Retain the ability to monitor and manage the integrity of ongoing data backup processes so that backup failures can be diagnosed and remedied before adversely impacting the BCP lifecycle.
- The need to hire Staff who can understand, design, implement and keep a BCP running 24/7 and be available to get business back in action after disaster strikes.
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