Disaster recovery team - Essay Example

Disaster Recovery Team Executive Summary Apart from being unpredictable, disasters remain inevitable, are of various magnitudes, and are of different types. They also require different approaches when responding to them. The best all-round solution is for the company to have a disaster recovery plan that helps in returning normalcy in case of a disaster. A disaster causes a disruption in any business enterprise for either the entire business or part of its productions. Either way, it causes loses in revenue to the firm.

Every business subsystem as well as operations should have an efficient disaster recovery plan in place. The business disasters have several causes including human, natural, and mechanical in nature. The Disaster Recovery CommitteeThe committee is in charge of procedures and operations of a discovery exercise. It is the central committee in any business company. For this company, it has twelve members from across all departments operational in the business. The departments are Information technology, management, electrical, finance, human resources, security department, and vendor.

The committee must prepare and maintain a discovery plan. ProceduresIdentification of threats and risksIt is the first step in the process of planning the recovery. The committee should identify the risks and threats associated with disasters. The committee does this exercise by carrying out risk analysis that includes among others evaluating threats posed to the continuality of the business (Mukhopadhyay, 2005). Other scholars refer to the business risk analysis as the business impact analysis and entails assessing the current environmental and physical control and security structures as well as evaluating their capacity to serve their purposes.

Differences in the magnitude of risk depend on location of occurrence, affected asset, as well as time. (Mukhopadhyay, 2005)Categorizing risksThe committee should classify the risks into various classes while undertaking evaluation. The process helps in arranging on a scale according to priority. The committee can categorize the risks into known categories. External risks refer to those risks that nobody can associate failures of the company with their occurrence (Klein, 2007). Their strengths come from the fact that they are not bound by the company and its management.

They fall into four subcategories including natural risks, risks caused by human factors, supplier, as well as civil risks. Developing risk evaluationCompletion of evaluation of risks means that the disaster recovery committee should sort and allocate scores to the categories. Determinants could be impact and likelihood. The management can prepare a score sheet to effectively score and sort out the categories. Determining the impact of disastersThe third step after assessment of risks and building of risk assessment is determining and outlining the impacts of each disaster.

The disaster recovery process carries out this responsibility as its core activity. In this category, the committee lists affected assets, determining the downtime tolerance limit for every affected asset, evaluating the cost of each downtime, and analyzing interdependencies. (Kahn, 2002) An effects diagramEvaluating disaster recovery approachesThe discovery management committee must evaluate different methods available to the company and the team for every affected asset as well as choosing the efficient method for application (Haugen, 2010).

In this step, the disaster recovery team will define the resources to use in the recovery process. Typical assets include among others power, data systems, telephone systems, and data network. ReferencesHaugen, H. M. (2010). Disaster relief. Detroit: Greenhaven Press.Kahn, M. B. (2002). Disaster response and planning for libraries. Chicago, Ill: American Library Association.Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.Mukhopadhyay, A. K. (2005).

Crisis and disaster management turbulence and aftermath. New Delhi: New Age International (P) Ltd., Publishers.