Clearly, it is not a good idea to try to transfer the experience of large corporations to the practices of small businesses: it is difficult for them to determine acceptable downtime from the assumption of acceptable losses. The management of small companies will not organize reserve personnel or plan their actions in the event of a building collapse, following the example of large businesses. Intuitively, the most accessible and important thing is highlighted, which is exactly the recovery of data – DR.

From the VSM perspective, data is an exceptional asset, and it is its continuity that allows organizations to continue their operations. Thus, data recovery is essential to identifying any organization after a disruptive impact. In fact, small businesses perceive data recovery as a surrogate for business continuity, although for business processes, equipment and personnel management, continuity is substantially more maintenance. It is also worth noting that it is important to understand the significance of time factors for the resumption of work processes and clearly prioritize tasks, that is, to subordinate the entire process to the logic of the WSM.

To ensure the continuity of small business, it is necessary to answer these questions:

• What do we need to recover first to stay in business?
• What do our customers need to have confidence in our stability?
• What do our partners need in order to safely continue to fulfill our orders?
• What do our suppliers insist on in order not to interrupt business with us?

The main task is to organize DR according to the logic of the formation of RTO norms, i.e. to formulate the value of RTO for the business as a whole and RPO values for each block of IT functions, which are acceptable for the business. Based on the values of RTO and RPO and should be formed Service Level Agreement, SLA.

It should be understood that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that is drafted sets the requirements for the IT infrastructure and competence of the performer. This means that you must have a data recovery infrastructure adequate to the business objectives. Ill-constructed infrastructure can bring unnecessary costs. It is unacceptable for a Service Level Agreement to be formulated without reference to business objectives. Thus, small business management faces the challenge of ensuring that the IT infrastructure is adequate to the content of a Service Level Agreement that meets business continuity objectives.

The post Continuity of small business appeared first on Continuity Compliance.

After the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001, the topic of Business Continuity Management (BCM) became popular, which encapsulated all aspects, including IT. Thus, the availability and continuity of IT services came under the same name “business continuity”. In the world of data backup, there has been a conflation of business continuity with disaster recovery. It’s important to understand that these are two different concepts. Of course, in a disaster, few people care about the definition of the terms, but a misunderstanding can put an organization at considerable risk through inadequate planning. A sure way to overcome the chaos of data loss is to learn the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity.

It is worth noting that in Russia, the use of the term “business continuity” cannot be considered correct, because our language associates the word “business” mainly with entrepreneurial activity. Thus, it is possible to get the wrong definition for our perception, such as “ensuring business continuity of the tax inspectorate”. In fact, such a term refers to the business activity of an organization (any government, commercial, or nonprofit entity) as a whole.

The post Disaster recovery and business continuity for small businesses appeared first on Continuity Compliance.