Business continuity and disaster recovery plan are necessary to be in place in order to continue to run your business when the unexpected happen. prepared companies face consequences that range from prolonged system downtime and the resulting revenue loss to going out of business altogether, yet many IT systems are not prepared to deal with such “worst case” scenarios.

The key to surviving such an event is a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. Every organization needs to put into place a set of policies and procedures for an IT-disabling disaster. The primary component of a business continuity strategy is a disaster recovery plan (DRP).

The first step in drafting a disaster recovery plan is conducting a thorough risk assessment of your network. It is best to list all the possible risks that threaten system and evaluate how imminent they are in your particular organization. Anything that can cause a system outage is considered a threat, from relatively common virus attacks and accidental data deletions to more rare large scale threats like floods and fires.

Determine the probability of these threats and prioritize them using a simple system: rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact. In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high.

Step 2: Establish your Budget; once you’ve figured out the risks the next question is; How do I minimize the impact on the business? The more preventative measures you establish to anticipate these risks the better you are able to cope with them when they happen. The trick is to get the maximum protection under realistic budget constraints.

Step 3 :Is to develop a plan, now its time to map out and define procedures covering every possible risk crisis. It is also time to make sure all the assets are in place to make recovery and business continuity flow as smoothly as possible.

Step 4 : Test your recovery plan . Like practicing fire drills, its important to create an almost automatic response to disaster. Tests may also point out weaknesses and additional treats which were missed in your original risk assessment. Once you have established your business continuity disaster recovery plan it important to continue to update it as new technologies and changing business environments affect your organization.