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Be smart, plan for the worst
How to get started today on disaster recovery planning |
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| DRP.. DRP.. DRP.. |
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| That's not the sound of a leaky faucet, but just as haunting. |
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| DRP stands for "Disaster Recovery Backup." And if you're not thinking about DRP or about Business Continuity Management (BCM), then you're not thinking. |
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| In fact, according to a recent survey, DRP and BCM are at the top of the worry list for financial and accounting professionals. |
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| DRP is not the same thing as having backup. Backup and restore procedures and protocols assume that you have lost data, perhaps due to a machine crash, virus, or operator error. |
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| DRP assumes that you have lost your ability to conduct business. This can be due to a natural disaster such as flood, a man-made disaster such as 9/11 or theft, or a fire or other happening which physically destroys your company location, records, equipment, and even possibly, some of your staff (though this occurrence is more properly considered under Business Continuity Management.) |
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| We human beings have considered our engineering to be infallible, ever since the first wheel was invented. Unfortunately, history has shown that this just isn't true-consider the "unsinkable" Titanic, or the first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, which had wings fall off due to metal fatigue, something never anticipated. |
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| You get the idea. The plain truth is that finance managers can never know what the future holds, so the prudent thing is to plan for the worst and hope for the best. |
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| Disaster Recovery Planning is usually a team effort, representatives from different departments develop a protocol for dealing with different types of disasters, and upon approval from top management, these departmental plans are rolled up into a single unified protocol and distributed company-wide. Of course, in a smaller company or practice, fewer individuals (or a single staff member) get more or all of the responsibility. |
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| Business Continuity Management is conceptually similar, but assumes that one or more of the business' key personnel may be unavailable. This can occur for many reasons, but the most common are illness, death, or resignation. It might seem ghoulish, but again, it's better to think the unthinkable, than to be caught flatfooted if it actually occurs. |
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| You can get started on DRP and BCM strategies by inventorying your business or practice resources. Where do you conduct your business, is it one office or in multiple offices? Are they geographically near each other where a flood or other disaster could take out more than one location? How is your practice's IT set up? Where are backups kept? What would be the effect on the business if different mid and top management were not available? |
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| None of these are easy questions to face, but finance managers and CPAs alike are much better off looking for the hard answers when they're not under the gun. Having those answers at hand may make the difference between being able to continue "business as usual", and closing the doors on the office, perhaps forever. |
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| Related links at HP.com: |
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| Rick Telberg is the leading commentator on the finance and accounting profession and editor of CPA Trendlines, the online journal of Bay Street Group LLC, a research and advisory firm. He is also author of the At Large column in the AICPA Insider, Editorial Director for AICPA Custom Media, and formerly publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Today magazine, group publisher of Accounting Technology and Practical Accountant magazines, and a developer of WebCPA.com, Pro2Net.com, and CPA2Biz.com. |
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| Any views or comments expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of Rick Telberg and Bay Street Group LLC and not necessarily those of any other organization. No person quoted or cited has any known connection to or interest in Hewlett Packard, and their appearance here should not be construed as an endorsement. |
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| Copyright 2007 Bay Street Group LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. |
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