Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning domain addresses the identification of an organization’s exposure to internal and external threats, and preservation of the business in the face of major disruptions to normal business operations. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning involve the preparation, testing and updating of specific actions to protect critical business processes from the effect of major system and network failures.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) helps to identify the organization’s exposure to internal and external threats; synthesize hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, and maintains competitive advantage and value system integrity. BCP counteracts interruptions to business activities and should be available to protect critical business processes from the effects of major failures or disasters. It deals with the natural and man-made events and the consequences, if not dealt with promptly and effectively.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) determines the proportion of impact an individual business unit would sustain subsequent to a significant interruption of computing or telecommunication services. These impacts may be financial, in terms of monetary loss, or operational, in terms of inability to deliver.

Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) contain procedures for emergency response, extended backup operation and post-disaster recovery, should a computer installation experience a partial or total loss of computer resources and physical facilities. The primary objective of the disaster recovery plan is to provide the capability to process mission-essential application, in a degraded mode, and return to normal mode of operation within a reasonable amount of time.

The candidate is expected to know the difference between business continuity planning and disaster recovery; business continuity planning in terms of project scope and planning, business impact analysis, recovery strategies, recovery plan development, and implementation. Moreover, the candidate should understand disaster recovery in terms of recovery plan development, implementation and restoration.

You can read about this domain in Chapter 11. This domain has the following major topics:

Setting requirements for business continuity

Analyzing business impact

Outlining backup and recovery strategies

Reviewing processes of disaster recovery

Testing plans for business continuity and disaster recovery