ABSTRACT
Business continuity is always a risk versus cost elimination process. While a planet-killer asteroid striking the Earth would indeed represent a considerable business disruption, the cost of developing and implementing a strategy to overcome such a scenario would likely not be considered as something that should be invested in. While the continuity plan for any business function will very likely include IT-related disaster recovery plans, even for seemingly entirely IT-centric business functions, the IT disaster recovery plan will rarely be the only part of the business continuity plan. The IT approach or focus on a site loss will invariably deal with the infrastructure aspects of recovery—getting desktops and laptops available, enabling network infrastructure, getting servers and storage up and running, and restoration of data and activation of applications. An important aspect to the IT considerations in business continuity is to have a thorough understanding of the impact of a disaster recovery or business continuity situation on data protection requirements.
