Enterprise Architecture and Disaster Recovery Planning
On the way to an effective Business Continuity Planning Philosophy

David Rudawitz

Enterprise IT Solutions, LLC

November 2003

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) and IT Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) are seldom combined in the same sentence much less integrated activities within a company. In this paper, a case will be made for the integration of these two critical business activities as well as promoting a unique business recovery planning philosophy. This paper outlines a logical approach to understanding a company as a system comprised of processes and tasks and then extends this to an approach to creating a comprehensive enterprise architecture. With this approach, a company can create a much more concise IT disaster recovery plan that is closely coupled with both the business and IT, thus maximizing the potential for a successful recovery from disaster or business interruption. This, in turn, provides the greatest probability of the company’s long term survival. An additional benefit to such an approach is a leveraged capability for business process re-engineering to further improve the performance of the company.