Disaster management Research

The main aim of the plan is to minimize the effects, minimize the chances of the tragedy happening again and put measures in place to avoid them. A disaster can either be manmade or natural. A manmade disaster is directly or indirectly caused by the actions of man, for example fire, sabotage etc. while a natural calamity occurs where man has little or no control over the situation, for example floods, hurricanes and tsunamis. In case of an emergency, the locals are always first to respond, the police and other NGO’s like red cross. Minimize disruption of normal day to day operations. The business should resume almost immediately after a disruption. A stable business gets back to business immediately after a disaster and continues its operations almost immediately.

Ensure the organization gains stability as it was before the disaster. An organization should not take too long to rebuild since losses will increase and the market for products or services will decrease. The plan should be followed step by step. Testing and regular learning tours for the company’s personnel is important to make sure they understand and know what to do when the worst strikes. The disaster response should also apply to the clients. Customers should be included (If any) since they are part of the business. To ensure in the occurrence of tragedy, the response team is activated immediately. Business continuity plan A good business continuity plan includes the following 1. Business resumption plan 2. Occupant emergency plan 3. Continuity of operations plan 4.

Incident management plan 5. Continuity of operation plan This plan contains efforts put in place to ensure that the business continues to perform its primary duties after a major disruption weather natural or manmade. The plan is made of three principals which include resilience, contingency, and recovery. The entity has to maintain stability even through desperate times. Continuity of operation plan The daily business operations must keep on going as usual despite unbearable circumstances. The aim of this plan is to enable stability in the organization through all situations. When a business has a disaster recovery plan, the management is confident that in case of an emergency or a disaster, measures are put in place to ensure that minimum losses are incurred and proper recovery of assets is done 2.

Delays are minimized since after the occurrence of a disaster, immediately measures are put in place to ensure almost immediately, the recovery process starts to take place. No planning since the planning was already done before the emergency happen. Standard systems for example alarm systems are reliable and efficient hence sending warnings before an incident happens. This helps prevent the loss of assets, lives and even the business’s critical data. An organization should ensure a backup system is put in place to ensure minimum amount of data is lost. The system should be up to date and updated on a regular basis. Resources Available resources should be distributed equally in all sectors of the organization to avoid imbalance. The management should ensure the recovery disaster plan gets adequate resources to deal with a disaster.

Suppliers In an event that a disaster happens and organization merchandise is destroyed, the suppliers of the organization should be able to supply them goods or services on credit to ensure the continuity of the business. Corrective measures Preventive measures These are measures that intend to prevent disasters before they happen. They identify and reduce risk for example keeping data backed up to prevent data loss, installing generators to prevent data loss and enable continued running of operations in case of a black out and conducting daily routine inspections to ensure assets and operations are in order. Detective measures Detective measures are put in place to discover the presence of any unwanted events within the information system of the business. They are made to expose any potential threats and problems.

These include, installing fire alarms to detect fire, updating antivirus soft wares to detect possible viruses and hackers, and training employees on what to do in an event an emergency occurs. Resources are financial consideration and the efforts of employees involved. • Establishing a planning committee A committee is a group of personnel in the organization who oversee, develop and implement the disaster response plan. The personnel include representatives from all departments of the organization. They mostly entail the operation manger and the data processing manager. • Performing a risk assessment The committee prepares a risk analysis and business impact analysis which include possible dangers that might affect the business negatively. All aspects considered include physical facilities, computer hardware and software systems. Communication links data files, database, customer services provided, user operations, the overall management information system structure, end user systems and other processing operation.

A written agreement with specific recovery alternatives should also be in the disaster recovery plan. • Collecting data It is crucial to back up the company’s information for example, employee’s information for example home address, phone numbers, list of company’s client’s, the suppliers contacts etc. The employees should be trained and educated on how to respond and know the basic emergency steps in a disaster response plan. It officially approves the plan to be used in case of a disaster. This is the final step of finalizing the creation of a disaster response business plan. When the plan is approved by the relevant officials, it is ready to manage a disaster. The above steps are to be followed respectively to achieve an effective and good disaster response plan.

The plan enables prevention of disasters and also prevents damages and losses to the business. Lax security. The procedure and plans put place it is argued that can never be enough to prevent occurrence of a disaster 5. Outdate plans A disaster response plan should always be up to date. Outdated plans may fail to detect modern errors, for example the lack of an updated antivirus may cause failure of the operating system. To ensure the plan is effective the following should be considered. How to handle disasters is also reviewed in that past mistakes are not repeated. -Identification of current disaster response strategies. An organization should be updated on the current methods of preventing disaster. Out dated methods may lead to losses.

-The emergency response team should be identified to avoid time loss and reduce decision making when a crisis is at hand. The main aim of these tools is to avoid intruders and protect classified documents from workers who are not cleared from viewing a particular document. For example, passwords and fingerprints. Geographical risks factors. A plan should consider geographical factors since some areas are prone to natural calamities for example floods and earthquakes. In a case where a business is located in such an area, the plan should consider the environmental factors that can impact the business. Complexity of networks is a challenge during the response. A simple network allows quick access to the network leading to a quick response. It is important to keep a detailed step by step recovery procedure, ensure it is tested and updated on a regular basis.

• Cloud disaster response plan. Using this process, a data center which belongs to a cloud provider is used as a backup data storage. Other types of disasters 1. Application failure. These are errors that occur when the online system of an industry is disrupted or shut down. This might affect online services rendered to customers and interrupt internal processes of a business. To avoid this failure, an application performance response plan should be put in system. Backup systems and proper response plans should be implemented to avoid this failure. Data center failure. A data center is a data facility which stores the organization’s data. Failure of this facility might be caused by natural calamities or intentional manmade like hackers and antiviruses.