Business continuity planning

Historically, enterprises that have survived natural or man-made disasters have had recovery plans in place and were ready to face the risk of business interruptions. This has been the traditional field of Disaster Recovery. Today, the increased dependence on technology and tighter requirements in terms of recovery speed have made recovery plans more complex and business processes more involved in the process of recovery from a failure. Business Continuity Planning, which manages failures of components of the business infrastructure, systems or network outages, misconfigurations, and natural disasters, should be treated as a necessity by conscientious system administrators, managers, and CEOs. In this chapter we discuss Business Continuity Management and Planning, illustrating the main phases of the planning process and the techniques that can be used to provide for recovery.