Modeling and analyzing disaster recovery plans as business processes

Abstract

The importance of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans has grown considerably in the recent years, becoming a well-established practice to achieve organization's resiliency. There are several applicable standards, like BS 25999-1:2006, sets of guidelines and best practices in this field. BC/DR plans are typically text documents and exercising is still the main measure used to verify them. On the contrary, to the common practice we suggest to model BC/DR plans as business processes using ARIS methodology and models, which have proven successful in the Enterprise Resource Planning systems projects. This provides uniform representation of BC/DR plans that can be applied across the whole distributed organization, strengthens the efficiency of traditional manual analysis techniques like walk-throughs, helps to achieve completeness, consistency and makes possible computer simulation of BC/DR processes. Timing and dynamic behavior, resource utilization and completeness properties have been also defined. It is possible to analyze them with computer support based on proposed ARIS model of BC/DR plan. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.