Business Continuing Plan and Disaster Recovery for BASF: Analysis

This report analyzes the disaster recovery plan of BASF, a major chemical producer, focusing on the key elements required for effective business continuity. The report begins by outlining the key components of a disaster recovery plan, emphasizing communication, equipment, data continuity, backup systems, and vendor management. It then examines internal, external, and environmental risks, using the Oppau explosion as a case study to illustrate the impact of disasters on the company and the community. The report further explores various recovery strategies, particularly focusing on the selection of backup sites, including cold, warm, and hot backup sites, with a rationale for BASF's choice of a hot backup site. Finally, it justifies the exclusion of cold and warm backup sites from the DRP test plan, providing reasons based on data restoration requirements and the company's economic strength. The report provides a comprehensive overview of BASF's approach to disaster recovery, highlighting the importance of a well-defined plan for maintaining business operations during and after a crisis.

Running head: BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
Business Continuing Plan and Disaster Recovery
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

1BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
Table of Contents
1. Key elements of the Disaster Recovery Plan...............................................................................2
2. Internal, external, and environmental risks..................................................................................3
3. Which of these recovery strategies is most appropriate?.............................................................3
4. Briefly describe each method and your rationale for why it will or will not be included in your
DRP test plan...................................................................................................................................4
Reference List:.................................................................................................................................6

2BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
1. Key elements of the Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster recovery implies set of policies and procedures that are followed after facing any
human or natural induced disaster. BASF is one of the most prestigious chemical producers
occupying a predominant place in 80 countries (reuters.com, 2018). While running the entire
process of business in chemical industry the organization has faced several disasters. The
incident of Oppau explosion occurred on September 21, 1921 has left a horrible impression in
mind of people when tower silo storing 4,500 tonnes of a mixture of ammonium sulfate and
ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded at a BASF plant in Oppau. As a result, of this incident
around 500 people have lost their life and more than 2000 got injured.
After this specific incident business, organizations especially belonging to chemical
sector have rendered a strong department of disaster management for recovering any natural
calamity or human induced disaster immediately. The seven key elements which are highly
significant for disaster recovery plan are as follows:
 Detailed communication plan having employee contacts and the contacts of technological
resources ( E.g. extinguishing department)
 Proper plan for equipments should be there for recovering the disaster. The equipments
include proper IT infrastructure, furniture and assets
 Implementing data continuity system
 Reviewing whether backup is running and serving for disaster preparation plan or not
 Making effective vendor communication and service restoration plan

3BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
2. Internal, external, and environmental risks
The mixture of ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded at the plant
of Oppau in Germany which resulted a disastrous death of around 500 people. More than 2000
people got injured due to this natural disaster. The blast covered 20 miles of the area of plant. It
not only damaged the factory but also it affected the entire community. As per internal damage
the entire organizational structure along with its human resources got affected (Wallace &
Webber, 2017). The company lost its organizational data regarding business profitability from
the explosion. As a result, the entire process of business lost its rhythmic flow. This kind of
explosion has damaged the ecological system of nature due to which the rate of environmental
pollution at that very specific time raised highly. External people apart from the organization had
to face risks in leading their daily life effectively. They had to face numerous health issues after
the explosion.
The primary internal risks and challenges that BASF had to face after facing the disaster
include financial challenges, lack of technological equipments, and support from human
resources and so on. After the incident, the rate of employee turnover was highly increased due
to which the organization had to face major risks in meeting organizational productivity. In
addition, while maintaining business image and reputation in the external market the
organizational managers had to face innumerable challenges. While pointing the environmental
risk factors Berke et al., (2014) has mentioned the rate of community damage and misbalance of
environmental ecology.

4BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
3. Which of these recovery strategies is most appropriate?
One of the most significant aspects of disaster recovery is to select a proper location from
which the recovery plan can be controlled. This specific location is primarily familiar as backup
site (Khoshkholghi et al., 2014). In this very specific backup site the data center would be
recreated in order to control the flow of business and management risk factors. Several backup
sites are available to manage the risk factors of damage among which cold backup sites, hot
backup sites, warn backup sites and alternative sites are most prominent.
Cold backup site is an appropriately configured space of a building which requires
restoring service before the activity of recovery starts. A warm backup site is already stocked
with hardware that represents a reasonable facsimile (Suguna & Suhasini, 2014). In order to start
damage control activity from warm site the management does not have to recreate data and
restore the services again. Hot site is nothing but the mirror image of current data of organization
along with all configured system. Company’s specialized damage control services handles this
specific recovery plan.
BASF being one of the most recognizable brands in the realm of chemical industry has
implemented hot backup site strategy for measuring their risk factors. Company database
available at the plant of Oppau in Germany was restored. As a result, the organization after
facing this disastrous consequence did not face difficulties in handling data. In this kind of
situation, hot backup site enabled the business experts in running their entire business process
effectively by choosing a different location (Watson, Farhangi & Iyer, 2014). As entire data was
restored the organizational managers did not face any kind of challenges in evaluating database
after shifting the location.

5BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
4. Briefly describe each method and your rationale for why it will or will not be included in
your DRP test plan
Rest of the two disaster plan methods that is cold backup site and warm backup site are
not selected due to several reasons. While implementing cold backup site plan the organization
had to restore entire data and information and configure data again for maintaining business
process (Cook, 2015). BASF had already restored their backup data due to which the data
experts do not need to configure their entire database again. In addition, it is undeniable that this
specific organization is constituted with economic strength. Therefore, they are successfully able
to implement hot backup site strategy by controlling business process with the help of restored
data (Okuyama & Santos, 2014). That is why the plan of cold backup site was not been accepted
as disaster recovery plan. Like the same way, BASF has observed that warm backup site can
never give backup data based on which company can get detailed overview about their position
in the market. Warm site is only flexible in providing hardware facilities (Mansoori et al., 2014).
As a result, in order to run the entire process of business the IT experts would have to restore
company database which is very much complicated and time consuming. Therefore, this specific
method was also been rejected as one of the most important strategies of disaster recovery plan.

6BUSINESS CONTINUING PLAN AND DISASTER RECOVERY
Reference List:
Berke, P., Cooper, J., Aminto, M., Grabich, S., & Horney, J. (2014). Adaptive planning for
disaster recovery and resiliency: An evaluation of 87 local recovery plans in eight
states. Journal of the American Planning Association, 80(4), 310-323.
Cook, J. (2015). A six-stage business continuity and disaster recovery planning cycle. SAM
Advanced Management Journal, 80(3), 23.
Khoshkholghi, M. A., Abdullah, A., Latip, R., Subramaniam, S., & Othman, M. (2014). Disaster
recovery in cloud computing: A survey. Computer and Information Science, 7(4), 39.
Mansoori, B., Rosipko, B., Erhard, K. K., & Sunshine, J. L. (2014). Design and implementation
of disaster recovery and business continuity solution for radiology PACS. Journal of
digital imaging, 27(1), 19-25.
Okuyama, Y., & Santos, J. R. (2014). Disaster impact and input–output analysis. Economic
Systems Research, 26(1), 1-12.
Suguna, S., & Suhasini, A. (2014, February). Overview of data backup and disaster recovery in
cloud. In Information Communication and Embedded Systems (ICICES), 2014
International Conference on (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
Wallace, M., & Webber, L. (2017). The disaster recovery handbook: A step-by-step plan to
ensure business continuity and protect vital operations, facilities, and assets. AMACOM
Div American Mgmt Assn.

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Watson, E. B., Farhangi, A., & Iyer, K. C. (2014). U.S. Patent No. 8,719,627. Washington, DC:
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.