CPDR "Q and A"

Q: What is, "Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery (CPDR)?"

A: Undertaken seriously, CPDR is, quite simply, Good Stewardship!

Wouldn't you agree? But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's take a step back and consider a more traditional understanding.

The Disaster Recovery Journal's online, "Business Continuity Glossary," defines a (business) continuity plan as follows:

Process of developing and documenting arrangements and procedures that enable an organization to respond to an event that lasts for an unacceptable period of time and return to performing its critical functions after an interruption.

They define disaster recovery as:

The ability of an organization to respond to a disaster or an interruption in services by implementing a disaster recovery plan to stabilize and restore the organization's critical functions.

Q: What does good stewardship mean to you?

(Pause for a moment to really think about that.)

In the broadest sense, good stewardship can be defined as using the resources made available to your organization, as effectively and efficiently as possible, to fulfill the mission or purposes these resources were given to promote. Undoubtedly, as a manager or staff member of a non-profit this isn't a foreign concept to you. Acting as a good and faithful steward of your organizations resources and purpose is something you live with and strive for every day. However, many organizations fail to consider the less obvious forms of good stewardship, such as CPDR. This is an understandable oversight. If life at your organization is like most others, your days are typically spent absorbed in a frantic and dizzying array of tasks. Most days, just keeping your head above water is probably a challenge, so finding the time to devote to planning for something that may not ever happen gets put on the back burner.

However, "things that may not ever happen," actually happen - to someone - every day.