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ContactDisaster Recovery and Business Continuity Starting Points
Tom Collins wrote a great post yesterday called "Law Firm Business Interruption" that is required reading. Tom sets out three principles that are essential elements of any disaster recovery plan:
1. Protect Personal Safety
2. Maintain Employee Contact
3. Protect Firm Survivability
If you start with this list, you will be well ahead of most other firms. Read Tom's post for more details.
I would add a fourth key principle: "No disaster recovery plan will survive intact after its first contact with a real disaster."
This point was hammered home again during the recent mass electrical outages in St. Louis (the stories are now that at one point there were more than 1 million outages (out of a potential 2.4 million) in the St. Louis area).
For what it's worth, I've found that the points I've made in the presentations and materials I've written on disaster recovery have stood up very well in the face of my own experiences. I'd now add that even with a good disaster recovery plan, you should not expect to have an easy or fun time.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Learn more about legal technology at Dennis Kennedy's Legal Technology Central page.
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Comments
If you're interested in how technology can impact your DR plan, check out this bundle of stories from Baseline, a monthly business/tech magazine.
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1995797,00.asp
I thought maybe some of your readers might find it interesting -- like reading about what law firms like Chaffe McCall in New Orleans and Thompson Coburn in St. Louis have done to replicate mission-critical data to ensure business continuity in the event of a catastrophe.
Posted by: Brian | August 10, 2006 03:24 PM
Depending on how big the disaster is, it may not be recoverable at all. Today we have serious virtual terror threats. Because so much of our economy relies on the internet, a massive virus could destabilize our economy then it wouldn't matter what type of data recovery you had..
Posted by: Seoslap | October 31, 2006 10:28 AM