Question:  Business continuity and disaster recovery are essential elements of any program. Research and discuss chaos monkey by Netflix and the use of testing infrastructures.

Business Risk Assessment

Every IT Manager should perform a business risk assessment for each key infrastructure that is responsible for the management, maintenance, and/or storage of data, be it cloud, or on-prem. An assessment should define, and identify the importance that data repositories play in housing critical data within an organization. The assessment should also define and document the disaster contingency and recovery plan for each manager’s area of responsibility. Questions that plan should answer include:

• What are the key business processes?
• What are the applicable risks to availability?
• What is our prioritization of recovery?

Contingency Plans

Businesses must have a contingency plan documented in the event that hardware, software or networks become dysfunctional or simply go down. This plan should explain the nature of the system unavailability in the event of an outage, and should detail a predetermined recovery process that will be implemented to regain operation. The contingency plan should describe, if necessary, off-site computer operations or temporary hardware or software use. Businesses should test regularly, and review this plan for updates to technology or other circumstances that may change.