Business Continuity Planning for Data Availability

Why does data availability matter?

Every organization depends on data availability to run its daily operations. Data availability is important to any type of business. For Example, a Bank needs availability of customer balance to allow that customer to transact a fund transfer transaction, in a similar way, a Hospital needs availability of the patient’s historical medical records as an input in the diagnosis process. These two examples highlight clearly why data availability is critical to business continuity. The importance of data availability for a business starts with the identification of critical business processes and their interdependencies. Critical business processes vary from one business to another. Business should spend ample time to determine its critical processes since it is the first step to ensure critical data is available whenever it is needed. Acceptable downtime for each critical process has to be established followed by the establishment of the recovery strategy. This will enable business to determine the required cost to ensure availability of its critical data. It is very important to note that risks which are associated with data availability have not only operational impact, but also the reputation and compliance impacts. Therefore, business should ensure its critical data is available all the time.

How can disasters affect your data availability and operations? 

Sources of disaster that can affect data availability are so many. Human error, technology failure, knowledge gap and natural disaster are some examples of things that can affect data availability. Disaster may limit a business to access its data temporarily or permanently which eventually affects your business operations. Critical data such as sales data, customer data and financial data when they are not available causes critical operations to reach a halt state. Revenue loss and reputation damage are some of the impacts to your business continuity. It is in this regard that business should take data availability as an important matter from management to board level. Disaster-like cyber attacks can wipe out all organization data from their storage in a very short period of time. This type of attack has become very common nowadays due to adoption of technology by most businesses. Technology related disasters should receive deserved attention from businesses since their impact on business operations are huge. Therefore, businesses should have a proper and working business continuity plan which will ensure the business continues to operate in the case of a disaster.

Improve your data availability by implementing business continuity plan

Robust business continuity plan plays an important role to rescue your business when it has suffered a disaster. One of the important items that has to be restored quickly after a disaster is data. The amount of downtime a business can tolerate (RTO) and amount of data that business can tolerate to loose (RPO) has to be considered when a business is developing a business continuity plan. Businesses should put in place strategies that ensure data availability is maintained all the time. These strategies should Implement recovery mechanisms that meet RPO and RTO stated by the business. All business units have to participate in the process of developing a business continuity plan. A successful business continuity plan needs continuous testing, training of team members and support from top management. A comprehensive and working business continuity plan provides room to improve business data availability in a situation where a disaster has occurred. In a worse case scenario business may also consider having insurance cover with respect to data loss. Well designed business continuity plan accelerates response time to disaster and helps your business to continue to maintain good relationships with its stakeholders.

About Emmanuel Damas

Emmanuel has ten (10) years of experience in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) domain. His technology experience cuts across several sectors including financial, education, manufacturing, telecommunications, health and transport. He has been involved in strategic and governance activities in relation to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as ICT policies and procedures design, Data analytics projects, Data migration projects, ICT system projects implementation, ICT Audits and Awareness trainings especially on data analytics and cyber security domains. Emmanuel's mission is to continue helping people and institutions in reaching their vision through adoption of effective ICT governance practices.