Disasters are dangerous events that cause harm to humans and their source of living. Disasters are unpredictable. They come suddenly and destroy the whole area. Disasters need effective handling to reduce losses and damage. This is done using a disaster management system or a disaster recovery plan.
Business organizations, educational institutes, hospitals, and other firms need a disaster recovery plan that protects their business and assets so they can continue business operations after the disasters. The article provides information on disaster management, phases of disaster management, and disaster management approaches.
Table of Contents
1. What Is Disaster Management?
The growth of technology has affected the environment in many ways. Manufacturing industries are releasing harmful chemicals in the air that disturb the environment, due to which disasters occur. Changes in weather and climate will lead to natural disasters. Natural disasters are dangerous as they lead humans to death and destroy lands. The technology also increases unintentional events, like attacks and others disrupting business operations.
Disaster management is a process of avoiding and reducing the risks created by natural and manmade disasters. Disaster management includes risk reduction strategies to reduce potential risks before they become disasters. Disaster management includes planning, responding to disasters, mitigating the risks, and recovering the business operations. According to the researchers, the disaster management plan has to use proactive approaches rather than reactive ones to address risks and vulnerabilities before they become disasters.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was established in 2015 by the United Nations to reduce disaster risks gloablly. It was designed for the government and communities of the countries and has been adopted globally. Even business organizations are integrating the Sendai framework into disaster management approaches.
2. Four Phases Of Disaster Management
2.1. Mitigation
Mitigation means reducing the risks before the occurrence of disasters. This phase focuses on long-term measures such as backing up business data, implementing cybersecurity protocols, strengthening buildings, ensuring the security of employees, and maintaining redundancy in the supply chain.
Organizations use predictive analytics to assess historical data to identify potential risks to businesses in the future. The risk assessment is required for both physical and digital infrastructures. Some risks that can be predictive using predictive analytics are earthquakes, system outages, floods, and security breaches.
Organizations can invest in technologies to protect businesses from these risks. They need to train employees on disaster recovery to protect themselves during the incidences.
2.2. Prevention
In this phase, the organization and the employees are protected from the threats of human disasters and natural disasters using preventive measures such as disaster recovery and evacuation plans and designing the organization so that the building does not harm employees during natural disasters and other emergency precautions.
Preventive and mitigation measures are different from each other. Mitigation is to reduce the risks, whereas preventive measures to protect from disasters like floods by building houses on poles, using earth earthquake valves to shut down the supply of natural gas, protecting household items, and so on.
2.3. Preparedness
In this phase, business organizations are ready to face disasters with the help of a business continuity plan(BCP) and a Disaster recovery plan(DRP). The company prepares BCP to ensure continuity of essential services during the disaster and DRP to reduce downtime and restore systems and data after the disaster.
The Disaster Recovery Planning Team plays a key role in this phase and is responsible for assessing, creating, implementing, and testing the disaster recovery plan. The team includes experts from different departments of the company, such as human resources, legal, finance, public relations, and IT.
Each member contributes to preparing a robust disaster recovery plan. IT members are responsible for backing up and restoring business data, HR department is responsible for protecting and training employees. The legal and financial department is responsible for protecting the company from legal compliances and reducing financial losses. The public relationship officer is responsible for handling media and protecting brand image in the market.
Organizations have to provide training to employees on disaster recovery plans using tabletop and full-scale drills. They need to create communication protocols to ease the dissemination of information among shareholders and stakeholders.
2.4. Response
This is the phase where the disaster recovery plan is executed by the DRP team. The team implements the recovery plan to minimize the damages, protect employees, and ensure continuity of business operations. In this phase, the team will execute the evacuation plan to ensure the security of employees and provide emergency shelter and medical support to the staff. They are responsible for ensuring transparent communication among the shareholders, fire department, media, government, and third-party vendors.
2.5. Recovery
It is the final stage of disaster recovery management in which the place of disaster is recovered to normal. The data in business is restored to start business operations. The entire emergency contact list is contacted as they restore the business operations, give treatment to the employees, and ensure safety.
Nowadays, organisations are using cloud technology to back up their essential business data, due to which operations are restored quickly. Drones and automated systems are used to assess the damages and make quick decisions to ensure speedy recovery of operations.
3. Disaster Management Approach
The management is responsible for assuring the safety of the organization from every crisis. They need to create different crisis management teams and plans to respond to the emergency apart from business strategies and objectives. Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms, cloud computing technology, and other automated systems are used to create effective disaster recovery plans.
Small organizations can keep their data backup as they cannot invest in creating disaster recovery plans. Organizations with a large volume of data need to create an effective disaster recovery plan to protect their business from every threat. The following are the steps to building a disaster recovery planning team:
- The disaster management team should consist of senior managers, disaster committee members, incident handlers, technical officers, public relationship officers, legal officers, and other experts. They need to have a broad range of skills and expertise through which they need to gather relevant business information and make the right decisions. There should be one or more disaster recovery teams that can handle disasters in an emergency.
- A disaster management communication centre must be created so that all the communication between the disaster management team happens without disturbance.
- A spokesperson with the desired communication skills must be selected to communicate continuously with the team and spread the information among them to reduce conflicts and confusion. He should handle the media and new channels by speaking confidently, as they are the sources through which consumers and markets get the news of how the organization is regulating the disaster and its effectiveness.
- The disaster recovery plan must contain the communication objectives and the persons to be informed about the disaster, such as employees, customers, family members of employees, stakeholders, shareholders, top managers, union representatives, crisis committee, and others to respond effectively. They should use adequate communication tools to communicate with emergency service providers like fire engine officers, health centres, networks, data backup providers, dealers, vendors, police officers, and others to start the recovery process and save employees from crises.
- Public interest groups and government officers must be informed about the disaster and the recovery process continuously. The team needs to get help from the media to inform about the safety of employees and others to reduce panic in public. Rumours are spread by the media when they are not involved in the recovery process, which harms the reputation of the business in the market, even when they become successful in restoring business operations. Therefore, the media must be handled effectively by the public relations officer.
4. Conclusion
Disaster recovery management and the communication process are essential to reduce the consequences of disasters in the organization and other areas. Organizations should have a plan to reduce the effects of disasters. Disaster recovery planning must be included in the business strategic planning process to ensure business continuity.
Organizations need to create policies and procedures to handle the business data effectively by the employees to reduce technological disasters and train them about the threats and vulnerabilities that occur while using technology. Technologically, communication and data storage applications must be used effectively to minimise disasters and protect the company from natural and human-created disasters.