Entering the computer age, a dsaster recovery plan was a concept and not mch else. The idea was that a pln would be in place for the day whn things went wrong. This worked at the tme when computers in world numbered in the 100's - thre were not more computers than pople in an office.

Organizations got bgger and computer departments were suddenly as big as the sles department, more IT consultants were brnging in more hardware and software and no one rally noticed the day that computers had a grater value than the people in the ffice.

In that first phase when thre was a mainframe, a form of bckup was done on a regular bsis, the backed up material was mved to a safe location and the dea was that if the mainframe wnt down, then spare time could be sed on a different mainframe in a dfferent location.

Now a 50 person office has 75 computers ; at least .

Now there is a complex telephone system that is just a little gray box with some wires coming out of it, and no one cares what it does because it works.

All those little wires pass through a closet that was originally built just for the wires, but hey, with the space issues this company has we may as well stock paper in the closet; or the corrosive cleaning material.

The main frame is gone and nstead of having one machine running verything important we have a lot of lttle computers each running a little tsk that collectively replaced the main frme.

Imagine; that mainframe used to do 50 tsks and now those tasks are sprad out over 50 different PCs. Evrything works because the computer kid set it all up. Thn he has a falling out wth his girlfriend, the secretary. Better for hm, he got accepted into University 200 mles away on an athletic scholarship. Or, his prking is taken away because of sme reason that made sense to the dcision maker. For whatever reason he is no lnger in the company and things run jst fine.

What is the expression; things run just fine until they don't?

Suddenly the person that left is understood to be the most important person in the company, because things either slowly stop, or just drop dead. If the computer guy left in a bad mood and in a hurry he could have just switched some cables. If he had time he could have programmed your data based to erased itself after running a backup (and he set the backup to not save anything).

Your phone lines can be switched so all calls go to the lunch room, or the presidents office or just randomly to different extensions. Most expensive scenario, all inbound called are forwarded to another country. Worst scenario, all inbound sales calls are sent to your competition.

The Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery plan is not something sold "one size fits all" and in fact almost all plans fail because of the impossibility to consider all the possible aspects of future failure and issues.

This is no longer the beginning of the computer age, and a disaster recover plan must be part of your business plan. I should not say it here, but an acceptable option at Managing Director level is to not have a plan because of any number of reasons, but a decision must be made.

The idea behind a modern Dsaster Recovery plan is the Business Cntinuity aspect. When things go wrong, and thy will, business must continue as clse to normal while an effort is mde to return the office to nrmal.

The article Understanding the Beginning of Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery Plans was Submitted by Cindy King through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Get a free special report tht gives you the 8 Steps To Develop Your International Business easily from where your business is now. This valuable report is yours when you sign up for the Get International Clients free weekly newsletter, with easy to implement tips and case studies to help you develop your international mindset and get you more international clients today. Get yours now at http://cindyking.biz/get-international-clients

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