Enterprise recovery planning, also known as disaster recovery planning, is a strategy to help businesses deal with emergency situations such as natural disasters, power loss, and corporate espionage. The plan includes offloading functions to unaffected facilities, outsourcing functions, and preparing an escalation procedure. It is important to identify key functions and departments, backup equipment, and who will handle tasks in disaster relief. Every company should engage in some type of corporate recovery planning.
Also known as disaster recovery planning, enterprise recovery planning is a type of strategy designed to help a business weather events that would otherwise threaten to damage or even shut down the business. Planning of this type typically focuses on dealing with emergency situations such as natural disasters, loss of power in key structures within the business operation, and even losses due to corporate espionage that breaches the company’s security and creates problems for the internal systems of the business.
The idea behind corporate recovery planning is to equip the business with specific action plans that can be implemented as and when some sort of disaster strikes. Typically, the plan will include items such as offloading functions to unaffected facilities or even outsourcing some functions to vendor partners until the affected facilities can be repaired and made usable again. The scope of planning will normally seek to allow for a wide range of events, including floods, wind damage, wildfires, and even situations involving political coups, outbreaks of war, or the simple loss of electricity or telecommunications capacity as a result of a severe storm.
Choosing the right elements to include in your business recovery planning will vary slightly from one type of business to another. In general, any function that is crucial to the core functioning of the business will be carefully evaluated and a specific plan will be developed to maintain that function even during catastrophic situations. Within this plan, the preparation of what is known as an escalation procedure is common to recovery planning. Such an escalation process generally allows for some variables based on different scenarios that may occur, providing alternate steps based on exactly what happens within the disaster situation.
Asking many key questions will often help in the business recovery planning process. It is essential to identify the key functions and departments that need to remain operational, or at least a way to transfer these functions to other structures without disruption of services. The security of backup equipment that can be put into service quickly is also important to the planning process. Even something as simple as determining who will handle which tasks in disaster relief will help make plan implementation more efficient and avoid wasting valuable time and resources.
Every company should engage in some type of corporate recovery planning. Even small businesses can benefit from determining how to address local issues such as severe weather conditions that could disrupt the operation and negatively affect the business’s ability to serve its clientele. Depending on the nature of the business and the range of scenarios that need to be considered, the task of business recovery planning can be somewhat simplistic or may require comprehensive solutions that address a wide range of potential disasters.
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