Understanding the Beginning of Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery Plans

Entering the computer age, a disaster recovery plan was a concept and not much else. The idea was that a plan would be in place for the day when things went wrong. This worked at the time when computers in world numbered in the 100's - there were not more computers than people in an office.

Organizations got bigger and computer departments were suddenly as big as the sales department, more IT consultants were bringing in more hardware and software and no one really noticed the day that computers had a greater value than the people in the office.

In that first phase when there was a mainframe, a form of backup was done on a regular basis, the backed up material was moved to a safe location and the idea was that if the mainframe went down, then spare time could be used on a different mainframe in a different location.

Now a 50 person office has 75 computers; at least .

Now there is a complex telephone system that is just a little gray box with some wires coming out of it, and no one cares what it does because it works.

All those little wires pass through a closet that was originally built just for the wires, but hey, with the space issues this company has we may as well stock paper in the closet; or the corrosive cleaning material.

The main frame is gone and instead of having one machine running everything important we have a lot of little computers each running a little task that collectively replaced the main frame.

Imagine; that mainframe used to do 50 tasks and now those tasks are spread out over 50 different PCs. Everything works because the computer kid set it all up. Then he has a falling out with his girlfriend, the secretary. Better for him, he got accepted into University 200 miles away on an athletic scholarship. Or, his parking is taken away because of some reason that made sense to the decision maker. For whatever reason he is no longer in the company and things run just fine.

What is the expression; things run just fine until they don't?

Suddenly the person that left is understood to be the most important person in the company, because things either slowly stop, or just drop dead. If the computer guy left in a bad mood and in a hurry he could have just switched some cables. If he had time he could have programmed your data based to erased itself after running a backup (and he set the backup to not save anything).

Your phone lines can be switched so all calls go to the lunch room, or the presidents office or just randomly to different extensions. Most expensive scenario, all inbound called are forwarded to another country. Worst scenario, all inbound sales calls are sent to your competition.

The Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery plan is not something sold "one size fits all" and in fact almost all plans fail because of the impossibility to consider all the possible aspects of future failure and issues.

This is no longer the beginning of the computer age, and a disaster recover plan must be part of your business plan. I should not say it here, but an acceptable option at Managing Director level is to not have a plan because of any number of reasons, but a decision must be made.

The idea behind a modern Disaster Recovery plan is the Business Continuity aspect. When things go wrong, and they will, business must continue as close to normal while an effort is made to return the office to normal.

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