As I know before COVID-19 outbreaks disaster recovery planning and business continuity planning was only part of the curriculum in highly professional courses in India like Chartered Accountancy. Most of the industries are not aware about these plans and also not bother themselves to learn about these plans.
While studying my CA course I also come to know about these planning but I thought these plans are useful for only IT companies and government bodies but now my view has been completely changed.
Now every business enterprise/ company has started thing about these plans here are few suggestions which can help them in choosing and implementing a proper disaster recovery plan. First of all let’s understand what Business continuity means, what it includes and how it works?
Business continuity means maintaining the uninterrupted availability of all key business resources required to support essential business activities, to meet business objectives and ensure continuity of services and operations, an enterprise shall adopt and follow well defined and time tested plans and procedures, build redundancy in terms and infrastructure, manage a quick and efficient transition backup arrangement for the business system and services.
During this lockdown most of Indian companies failed to manage their business operation through work from home because most of them are not having facility of cloud computing even many of them are not aware about cloud. Lot of Indian companies are having local server and due to lockdown biggest problem for them is how to access that data? There are many software which are providing remote connectivity to server but they need subscription and installation on client PC but due to lack of awareness of such kind of facility they could not make it possible.
Every company should implement business continuity plan here are few steps which can help;
Risk Assessment
First of all asses the risk which can interrupt your business operations like lockdown, flood, fire etc.
Determination of recovery alternatives
After assessing the risks enterprise should determine recovery alternatives in case of any of risk/threat identified above happened then how they can recover/access their data, how they can resume their business operations, avail an insurance facility for disruption in business operation, here I will share with you a nice example of availing insurance “Wimbledon which is biggest tennis tournament organized by the All England Lawn Tennis Association, organizers of this tournament obtained pandemic insurance, during last 17 years they have paid $34 million as premium and this year Wimbledon was set to run from 29 June but was cancelled due to coronavirus pandemic due to such cancellation it’s organizers will receive $141 million from insurance company.”
Recovery plan implementation
Once they have decided about recovery alternatives in this phase they have to implement these alternatives like avail internet baking facility, avail third party transfer facility from banks, avail could base data backup facility or get a software to access data from local server, if they are not having large data then they can also use Google drive where everyone can store data free of cost up to 15 GB.
Recovery plan Validation and Testing
Once these plans are implemented these plans should be timely updated and tested properly.
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