Disaster Recovery Planning
Preserving Your Information Technology.
Generally, Disaster Recovery refers to recovering and restoring information technology subsystems (applications, IT services) in support of business.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning are complementary strategic initiatives using identical principles and processes. But while Disaster Recovery focuses on IT services, Business Continuity planning focuses on the resumption or continuation of business processes, products and services. The basic steps to create a Disaster Recovery plan are:
- Risk Assessment and Application Impact Analysis (AIA) - determination of what systems are at risk and how each impacts critical business functions.
- Plan Development - development of systematic procedures to recover IT infrastructure and services, should it be compromised.
- Testing & Simulation - testing the plan (acting it out) to ensure viability and familiarity.
- Plan Maintenance - keeping plans current and making them part of corporate policy and culture.
- Incident Management - executing the plan when an incident occurs.
Disaster Recovery should include planning for restoration or recovery of hardware, applications, data, networks and communications. Plans must also consider the possibility that key personnel may not be available at the time of an incident. Many types of disasters such as floods, storms, power outages and illnesses can affect employees on a personal as well as professional level, and redundancies should be put in place.
Statistically speaking, only about 50% of businesses that sustain a major incident recover from it. Companies with a sound Disaster Recovery plan get back on their feet with minimal cost in shorter time. Without proper planning, organizations are left making desperate, uninformed decisions in order to stay in business.
Asset-Centric Disaster Recovery Software
Ironically, IT Disaster Recovery planning has traditionally been a paper-based exercise developed upon a series of premeditated scenarios. The result is often a 500 page 3 ring binder containing the flood plan, hurricane plan, etc. The problem with disasters is that they are random. Before 9/11 no one planned for airplanes flying into skyscrapers and before hurricane Katrina, no one considered the possibility of an entire city submerged in water. What these tragedies invariably taught us is that some disasters are unavoidable and organizations must plan for the unforeseeable.
Today, smart businesses do their Disaster Recovery planning online using the eBRP Suite. This gives them total visibility of all assets, and dynamic actionable planning based on real data. The advantage of this modern system is that it is asset-centric and can respond with actionable plans in real time no matter what incident has disrupted the organization.
At the core of asset-centric planning is an inventory of all assets, the basic elements of a business organization:
- People
- Facilities/Infrastructure
- Technology
- Vendors/Suppliers
- Process (Business Functions)
- Products/Services
These elements are vital to an organization's products and services. Once inventoried, interdependencies may be mapped out. When an incident occurs, the planner need only indicate which assets have been compromised to see the operational impact and to activate the action plan to recover them. In times of crisis, the vital information for Disaster Recovery is what has been compromised and who must act to recover it, not how the functions have been compromised (flood, hurricane, blackout, etc.) which does little to restore them.