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Disaster Recovery - The Common Misconception
- Michael Lay, CBCP
- Aug 12, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 23, 2022
By: Michael Lay, CBCP
Today, the majority of businesses establish goals and objectives around creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan. Whether driven by SOX, HIPPA, PCI compliance, external auditors or other initiatives, the general comment is, “we need to have a DR plan.” Conventional wisdom suggests that, to recover from a disaster event, we need a plan. However, to create a DR plan, you must have some type of approach or strategy to focus resources and planning efforts. Trying to articulate the approach or strategy is where most efforts start to lose traction or shift to focus completely on technology recovery, losing sight of the business operations.
Completing a technology recovery plan is were many organizations stop, believing they have an adequate recovery plan in place. The common misconception is the belief that the technical DR plan provides an acceptable approach to maintain business continuity. Since the technology recovery plan does not address personal health and safety issues, facilities, communications nor business operational processes, the capabilities to maintain normal business operations is minimized.
The Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) has developed a holistic approach, creating a methodology that focuses on Business Continuity Management (BCM). BCM is a program that introduces industry accepted terminology and defines processes and structured results that incorporate industry best practices focused on maintaining business continuity. The objective of BCM is to ensure an organization is resilient to potential threats or unplanned events that affect normal business operations. This objective is coupled with a strategy that is developed to reduce the impact of a threat or processes/procedures to recover from unplanned events that cannot be controlled or mitigated.
The DRII has developed professional practices that are focused on creating, implementing, and maintaining a formal BCM program that is outlined on the www.drii.org website and detailed in the professional practice subject area overview below.
Professional Practice Subject Area Overview (taken from the DRII website)
1. Program Initiation and Management
Establish the need for a Business Continuity Management Program within the entity and identify the program components from understanding the entity's risks and vulnerabilities through development of resilience strategies and response, restoration and recovery plans. The objectives of this professional practice are to obtain the entity's support and funding and to build the organizational framework to develop the BCM program.
2. Risk Evaluation and Control
The objective of this professional practice is to identify the risks/threats and vulnerabilities that are both inherent and acquired which can adversely affect the entity and its resources, or impact the entity's image. Once identified, threats and vulnerabilities will be assessed as to the likelihood that they would occur and the potential level of impact that would result. The entity can then focus on high probability and high impact events to identify where controls, mitigations or management processes are non-existent, weak or ineffective. This evaluation results in recommendations from the BCM Program for additional controls, mitigations or processes to be implemented to increase the entity's resiliency from the most commonly occurring and/or highest impact events.
3. Business Impact Analysis
During the activities of this professional practice, the entity identifies the likely and potential impacts from events on the entity or its processes and the criteria that will be used to quantify and qualify such impacts. The criteria to measure and assess the financial, customer, regulatory and/or reputational impacts must be defined and accepted and then used consistently throughout the entity to define the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for each of the entity's processes. The result of this analysis is to identify time sensitive processes and the requirements to recover them in the timeframe that is acceptable to the entity.
4. Business Continuity Strategies
The data that was collected during the BIA and Risk Evaluation is used in this professional practice to identify available continuity and recovery strategies for the entity's operations and technology. Recommended strategies must be approved and funded and must meet both the recovery time and recovery point objectives identified in the BIA. A cost benefit analysis is performed on the recommended strategies to align the cost of implementing the strategy against the assets at risk.
5. Emergency Response and Operations
This professional practice defines the requirements to develop and implement the entity's plan for response to emergency situations that may impact the safety of the entity's employees, visitors or other assets. The emergency response plan documents how the entity will respond to emergencies in a coordinated, timely and effective manner to address life safety and stabilization of emergency situations until the arrival of trained or external first responders.
6. Plan Implementation and Documentation
The Business Continuity Plan is a set of documented processes and procedures which will enable the entity to continue or recover time sensitive processes to the minimum acceptable level within the timeframe acceptable to the entity. In this phase of the Business Continuity Management Program, the relevant teams design, develop, and implement the continuity strategies approved by the entity and document the recovery plans to be used in response to an incident or event.
7. Awareness and Training Programs
In this professional practice, a program is developed and implemented to establish and maintain corporate awareness about BCM and to train the entity's staff so that they are prepared to respond during an event.
8. Business Continuity Plan Exercise, Audit and Maintenance
The goal of this professional practice is to establish an exercise, testing, maintenance and audit program. To continue to be effective, a BCM Program must implement a regular exercise schedule to establish confidence in a predictable and repeatable performance of recovery activities throughout the organization. As part of the change management program, the tracking and documentation of these activities provides an evaluation of the on-going state of readiness and allows for continuous improvement of recovery capabilities and ensures that plans remain current and relevant. Establishing an audit process will validate the plans are complete, accurate and in compliance with organizational goals and industry standards as appropriate.
9. Crisis Communications
This professional practice provides the framework to identify, develop, communicate, and exercise a crisis communications plan. A Crisis Communications plan addresses the need for effective and timely communication between the entity and all the stakeholders impacted or involved during the response and recovery efforts.
10. Coordination with External Agencies
This professional practice defines the need to establish policies and procedures to coordinate response, continuity and recovery activities with external agencies at the local, regional and national levels while ensuring compliance with applicable statutes and regulations.
These practice areas are not in a formally defined order; the most effective order will depend on where your organization is in the process of developing a business continuity strategy. This strategy will be the focus for development of a DR plan that is aligned with business continuity requirements. Most organization might begin with a Risk Assessment (RA) and a formalized Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to formally capture business operational requirements. Focusing a business continuity strategy on these business defined requirements will foster a more robust and cost effective DR strategy and plan.
Depending on your organizational size, it may be prudent to engage Certified Business Continuity Professionals that are well versed in these subject areas to develop the most appropriate Business Continuity Management strategy and assist in developing the most cost effective DR plan to support your operational capabilities.
As a trusted advisor, we have helped clients navigate uncharted preparations for unplanned events that could impact normal business operations. For more information, please reach out for assistance.