Business Continuity and Disaster recovery plan In a University
Computer Sciences and Information Technology
Business Continuity and Disaster recovery plan In a University
With the increase in digital technologies’ dependency to provide services and generate revenues, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential for every organization. Business continuity entails the maintenance of business function or prompt resume of operations in significant disruption. On the other hand, a business continuity plan is a set of procedures and instructions that an origination follows to restore operations in the event of a disaster. The Disaster Recovery plan focuses on the restoration of the IT infrastructure and operations following a crisis (Jorrigala, 2017). As organizations rely more on technological and electronic data, threats and disasters are increasing. Due to this disaster, organizations may lose revenue and incur unprecedented expenses following the unpreparedness to handle the disasters. This paper seeks to expound on the importance of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans, its elements, and best-fit practices in responding to emergencies in a university.
Being a learning institution, the university must keep the operation at all times, and in case of disruptions, resumes function immediately. To do this, they need a business continuity and recovery plan. This protocol ensures the prevention, continuity, and recovery of operations in the event of a crisis. There are a few considerations to ensure smooth operations in the institution. Firstly, threat analysis identifies the potential threats that are likely to damage, for essence, fire, natural disasters, and cyber-attacks. Secondly, role assignment, this entails the understanding the chain of command and the efficient substitute plans in the absence of the primary plan.
Additionally, employee training of their different responsibilities (Muflihah, 2018). Thirdly, communications, understanding how well the information following a crisis can quickly and efficiently be disseminated though the originations and identifying the strategic points of contacts. Additionally, the backup plans for critical applications, documents, and resources. Through this, the organization can have short-term and long-term survivability for different assets.
Disaster recovery is an imperative aspect of security data and maintains the operations of an organization. However, there are several options for disaster recovery that the university ca implements out there; selecting the best fit recovery process can be difficult. There are several options to choose from and identify which one suits the organization’s needs. Firstly, a cold site disaster recovery plan entails renting space in a secondary facility, whereby the university cans et up an event disaster office. There is the infrastructure to get served up in these second facilities, power cooling, and network connectivity. It also provides an option plan for working following a disaster, are left inactive when not in use (Somasekaram, 2017). However, the slower in terms of disaster responses and not viable for organizations with stringent uptime requirements. Secondly, hot site disaster recovery has a remote backup facility with up-to-date copies of data in the event the primary site fails; thus, shifting to this backup plan is swift since its always active. However, it is more expensive than the cold site DR. Third, virtual DR, whereby there’s a backup facility known as virtual machines that can run the work station, evades the need to reconstruct a physical server. This is targeted by placing a virtual server on reserve capacity or, in other instances, on the cloud. This makes the recovery time instant, thus no losses to downtimes (Jorrigala, 2017).
Business vest practices play an essential role in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. These processes best practices inclusive of devising a contingency plan to ensure that all the organizations’ components are fully covered in the vent of a disaster. This is possible through adequate documentation and ensuring that it prioritizes the critical areas. Secondly, maintain full copies of crucial data in a secondary location. Additionally, by keeping the plans up to date to ensure that changes are reflected and viable in the event of any changes, there are possible changes between inception and response to disasters (Timms, 2018). Thirdly, another critical best practice is to test the plan to ensure that it works to avoid chaos in crisis times. Fourthly, leverage virtualization to facilitate an easy transition from the disaster site to the secondary backup with minimal inconveniences. Adhering to these procedures will make the business continuity and disaster recovery plan effective and operational in the university.
References
Jorrigala, V. (2017). Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan for Information Security.
Muflihah, Y., & Subriadi, A. P. (2018). An essential element of its business continuity plan: systematic. Jurnal Informatika, 12(1), 17-23.
Somasekaram, P. (2017). A Component-based Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Framework.
Timms, P. (2018). Business continuity and disaster recovery–advice for best practice. Network Security, 2018(11), 13-14.
