Disaster Recovery Planning

Undoubtedly, Disaster Recovery Planning has become necessity in today’s highly competitive and volatile environment. In case of IT industry Disaster Recovery Planning covers both the hardware and software required to run critical business applications and the associated processes to transition smoothly in the event of a natural or human-caused disaster. To plan effectively by a Disaster Recovery Planning, you need to first assess your mission-critical business processes and associated applications before creating the full Disaster Recovery Planning.

Disaster Recovery Planning is designed specifically for recovering hardware and software (e.g. data centers, application software, operations, personnel, telecommunications) in information system outages. It is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that you can forget about, once it is completed. An effective Disaster Recovery Planning is a live recovery plan. The plan must be maintained and tested/ exercised regularly.

An effective Disaster Recovery Planning consists of the following stages:

·       Programme description

·       Pre-planning activities (project initiation)

·       Vulnerability assessment and general definition of requirements

·       Business impact analysis

·       Detailed definition of requirements

·       Plan development

·       Testing programme

·       Maintenance programme

·       Initial plan testing and plan implementation.

The first step in drafting Disaster Recovery Planning is conducting a thorough risk analysis of your computer systems. List all the possible risks that threaten system uptime and evaluate how imminent they are in your particular IT shop. Anything that can cause a system outage is a threat, from relatively common manmade threats like virus attacks and accidental data deletions to more rare natural threats like floods and fires. Determine which of your threats are the most likely to occur and prioritize them using a simple system: rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact. In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high.

Disaster Recovery Planning, for example in a small Internet company (less than 50 employees) located in California could rate an earthquake threat as medium probability and high impact, while the threat of utility failure due to a power outage could rate high probability and high impact. So in this company's risk analysis, a power outage would be a higher risk than an earthquake and would therefore be a higher priority in the Disaster Recovery Planning.

Actually, Disaster Recovery Planning is a comprehensive statement of consistent actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster. Therefore Disaster Recovery Planning should be documented and tested to ensure the continuity of operations and availability of critical resources in the event of a disaster.  The primary objective of Disaster Recovery Planning is to protect the organization in the event that all or part of its operations and/or computer services is rendered unusable. Preparedness is the key. The planning process for a well planned Disaster Recovery Planning should minimize the disruption of operations and ensure some level of organizational stability and an orderly recovery after a disaster.

Disaster Recovery Planning establishes priorities for processing and operations: The critical needs of each department within the organization should be carefully evaluated in such areas as:

·       Functional operations

·       Key personnel

·       Information

·       Processing Systems

·       Service

·       Documentation

·       Vital records

·       Policies and procedures

The Disaster Recovery Planning is the most important disaster-planning document you can have on hand. If your library does not have one, steps should be taken to create of one.  Otherwise you can buy Disaster Recovery Planning templates designed specifically for this purpose, like http://www.disasterrecoverysurvival.com. Disaster Recovery Planning Template - well in all honesty we find very few things that are totally free.

Having said that, here is a FREE checklist for the structure of your template and Disaster Recovery Planning template – checklist:

·       Purpose of Information Systems Business Continuity Recovery Plan

·       Business Continuity Philosophy

·       Policy Statement

·       Overview of the Plan

·       Phases of Recovery

For details about Disaster Recovery Planning checklists, toolkits and templates, please visit: http://www.disasterrecoverysurvival.com