Many of us in IT focus on the quality of our system backup-- or, at least we intend to. System backups are essential, but are they enough?Disaster Recovery vs Business Continuity
Good backups are a way to be certain we can recover from a disaster. This is an IT strategy essential. In recent years, however, we've begun to learn that there is an added dimension to disaster recovery that is easily overlooked: business continuity.
Simply put, a business continuity strategy helps ensure that we'll be able to continue doing what we're supposed to while we're recovering from a disaster.
When Katrina hit (that's what this post's picture is from), church members and staffs evacuated in all directions. Very few had a plan that would allow their staffs to access their database and accounting systems while they were dispersed throughout the U.S. Those that did had a business continuity strategy.
How About You?
Do you have a business continuity strategy? While we pray that we'll never need one, the reality is that we might. And being a good steward may require that we had one in place.
I've written an article on this topic that has more details about what we recommend.
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1 comment:
Nick, it seems like there are at least four distinct pieces to what we often call backup. Backup itself, Archiving, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity. But...what about the new legal stuff regarding data retention? That may be part of archiving, or it might be something different all-together.
I'd love to have a CITRT conference call on such subjects. I've become very uncomfortable with our solution, even though I think we're doing a lot of right things. Unfortunately, it's not obvious to me how to get back to being comfortable!
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