Your Work place is no longer available, disaster has struck, and time is money! How many times have you heard these statements?

It is a nightmare for CIOs and IT directors to have to explain downtime to their CEO and CFO.

For many CEOs and CFOs, what was important yesterday is no longer valid today. Too much concentration and spending has been invested into the infrastructure of networking which opposes the reality of today, that is more concentrated upon business availability and continuity.

What would happen if your company had a small disaster that equals to big trouble? If something happens to the workplace, then how much will it cost to recover lost data? What contingency plan does your company have? And finally, how much will all of the above costs? This is not an example of psychic divination, it is a mere fact and we all experimented that after September 11th 2001.

There are different variations to business continuity, which will all depend on to which extent is acceptable for a company to have a downtime. Is it two days, one hour or perhaps not even a mere 5 minutes? Does the company need business continuity to the extent of an off-site disaster recovery?

Business continuity can be differentiated in two levels.

1. Business continuity where we secure and manage all risks which may be brought about by technology failure. This includes human error, equipment failure, database corruption, hacking and various other external disasters.

2. Business continuity where we require an offsite backup (Disaster Recovery Site) to resume the same level of productivity in case of workplace disruption. The disaster recovery (DR) planning deals with massive site failure whether it is complete or partial. Site failure is typically the permanent consequence of broadly disruptive forces.

Threats to businesses are more obvious today, however, they have always existed and they always will prevail. The event, which occurred on September 11, changed the definition of crisis management plans since many companies had disaster recovery plans in place. However, very few had an off-site plan.

A DR plan begins with evaluating the vulnerabilities of an organization