Disaster Recovery Planning

The challenge

• Major incidents and disasters increase the executive awareness that your company needs a disaster recovery plan.
• Traditional, extended, dense plans satisfy auditors but may not help your recovery should an actual disaster occur.
• DRP can be used for many incidents, not just for big disasters. Do not fall into that trap.
• Outsourced solutions make you more reliant on vendors having DRP in place. Make sure they satisfy your company's recovery objectives.

Our advice

Insight

• A DR plan is all about service continuity, so design it to be used for isolated and data center-wide events.
• Murphy is with us all the way. Failures happen. Use the DRP to enhance your system's resiliency. Shorten the recovery time, as appropriate for your company. Risk probability analysis is not suitable for most companies.
• Your planning starts with knowing what is genuinely critical. Not all services require fast failover capabilities. Focus your resources where needed.

Impact and results 

• Use business impact to determine appropriate objectives for service downtime.
• Document your response plan from incident detection to recovery.
• Create a roadmap to close the gaps between your current DR capabilities and what the company needs.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Get started

Our concise executive brief shows you why you should develop a sound disaster recovery plan in your company. We'll show you our methodology and the ways we can help you in completing this.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Executive Brief(ppt)

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• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phases 1-4 (ppt)
• Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP (zip)
• Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP – Healthcare Example (zip)

Define the DR scope, where you are today, and document dependencies

You have to know where you stand first.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phase 1: Define DRP Scope, Current Status, and Dependencies (ppt)
• DRP Maturity Scorecard (xls)
• BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment (xls)
• DRP Project Charter Template (doc)

Conduct a business impact analysis to determine what needs to recover first and how much (if any) data you can afford to lose in a disaster

Define an objective impact scoring scale for your company. Have the business estimate the impact of downtime and set your recovery targets.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phase 2: Conduct a BIA to Determine Acceptable RTOs and RPOs (ppt)
• DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (xls)
• Legacy DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (xls)
• DRP BIA Scoring Context Example (doc)

Document the disaster recovery workflow entirely

The need for clarity is critical. In times when you need the plans, people will be under much higher stress. Build the workflow for the steps necessary to rebuild or maintain business functionality. Identify gaps and brainstorm on how to close them. Prioritize solutions that mitigate the remaining risks.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phase 3: Identify and Address Gaps in the Recovery Workflow (ppt)
• DRP Recovery Workflow Template (PDF)
• DRP Recovery Workflow Template (Visio)
• DRP Roadmap Tool (xls)
• DRP Recap and Results Template (ppt)
• DRP Workbook (xls)

Complete, improve, and maintain your DR capabilities

Identify initiatives to continue to improve your recovery capabilities.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phase 4: Complete, Extend, and Maintain Your DRP (ppt)
• Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP (zip)

Additional business continuity tools and templates

Use the templates as needed to supplement the steps we discussed.

• DRP Incident Response Management Tool (xls)
• DRP Vendor Evaluation Questionnaire (xls)
• DRP Vendor Evaluation Tool (xls)
• Severity Definitions and Escalation Rules Template (doc)