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Disaster
Planning
IT Productivity
Center
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No, it needn't be difficult. Much of a DRP initiative is common sense. The rest
is greatly simplified through simple to use proven tools and templates.
This Disaster Planning Template was use by consultants who created the
Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Resumption plan that Merrill Lynch used
after 9/11. It is a proven process and set of tools.
This site is designed to catalog the easiest yet most effective approaches and products... to make disaster recovery planning less of a trauma and more of a business process.
The creation of the plan itself is the first port of call, but we also examine contingency audit and risk analysis from a simplification perspective.
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Risk analysis
is inextricably linked with disaster
recovery. Assessment of the risks which may
lead to disaster is essential in the
determination of what controls are
appropriate to the situation. Again,
however, risk analysis is often made more
difficult than necessary.
Do you really
need a complicated piece of software to
create your plan? Do you need 20 years
experience in business continuity planning?
Do you need to divert untold resources into
the plan creation exercise? Certainly, if
you employ the
Disaster Recovery Planning Template the answer
is... NO!
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How do you ensure that your disaster recovery plan meets your actual needs? How do you know that it will all work? Do you audit it, and if so, how?
Equally fundamentally, do you know what your resource/service dependencies are and what their time criticalities are? What of your actual everyday contingency practices - do they measure up?
To determine and ensure all of this with minimum fuss, a comprehensive but extremely simple to use product is now available.... the
Disaster Recovery Toolkit
- Business and IT Impact Analysis.
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Disaster Planning Information |
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Risk
analysis is inextricably linked with
disaster recovery. assessment of the
risks which may lead to disaster is
essential in the determination of
what controls are appropriate to the
situation. Again, however, risk
analysis is often made more
difficult than necessary.
The
Threat & Vulnerability Assessment
Tool Kit
and tool was designed to simplify
matters, and to make risk analysis
more widely accessible through
automation. It is now probably the
most widely used product and method
in the world
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For more information on disaster recovery plans and business continuity we are pleased to introduce our online
IT Productivity Center.
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Disaster Planning News
Minimun and Standard Power Protection for Workstations for DRP and BCP
 Personal computers and remote servers often are damaged by
subtle anomalies that users never see, such as sags, surges, spikes, brownouts,
line noise, frequency variation, switching transients and harmonic distortion. A
business on typical utility power is subjected to these hidden power problems
every day and complete outages several times a year. Solutions that you should
implement for all such equipment include:
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Minimum -
Surge suppressors address the power surges, but have no effect on the
under-voltage and variance conditions that can erode equipment health over
time or zap it in an instant.
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Standard -
Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPSs) protect your IT systems by conditioning
incoming power to smooth out the sags and spikes that are all too common on
the grid and other primary sources of power Providing ride-through power to
cover for sags or short-term outages (30 ย 60 minutes,
typically). more info
Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity
Disaster
planning, emergency
preparedness, or business
continuity (and experts note that there are differences) - the goals are ultimately the same: to get an organization back up and
running in the event of an interruption.
The problem causing the interruption could be one computer crashing or an
entire network crashing. Or it
could be an electrical outage or the result of a terrorist activity. The goal is to have some contingency
plans in the event of a problem. A
disaster recovery plan exists to preserve the organization so that it can
continue to offer its services.
A
disaster recovery plan is a users' guide - the documentation - for how to
preserve an organization. In order
for a plan to be useful, it must be created before an interruption occurs. Business continuity is disaster
recovery. Lost revenue is a driving
force in business continuity. The
reason to do a recovery plan is essentially to keep the funding coming in and
the services going, and the clients being served.
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Emergency
planning are those procedures and steps done immediately after an
interruption to business.
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Disaster
recovery are the steps taken to restore some functions so that
some level of services can be offered.
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Business
continuity is restoration planning, completing the full circle to
get your organization back to where it was before an
interruption.
In
order to write your plan, you have to do some planning. This planning is the
process that will get you to the step where you then commit your plan to paper -
you canยt write a plan until you do the preparation. The most difficult thing is getting
started; the second most difficult task is keeping the plan
current. more info
The Difference Between Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning Defined
Disaster
Recovery Planning (DRP) is the process by which you resume business
after a disruptive event. This
typically means that you can get the enterprise computers, networks, and data
base operational. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like
malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.
Given the
human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to
ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. However
Janco has found that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate
their Disaster Plans in the last few years.
Business Continuity
Planning (BCP) suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can
keep the enterprise going and meet it business objectives. This goes beyond the
enterprise computers, networks and data bases. However, the two terms are married under
the acronym DR/BC or DRP/BCP. At any rate, Disaster Recovery Planning and/or
Business Continuity Planning facilitate how a company will keep functioning
after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are
restored.
more info
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Scope
Recognizing the scope of the requirements, Janco
suggests that you purchase the Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity Template and the do the following:
- Conduct a business impact
assessment. This involved a crossfunctional team to evaluate the
business requirements and tier data based on the importance to our business
operations.
- Protect data and
applications. It was important to back up data frequently to
ensure records are kept, so we needed to upgrade
our backup equipment to a
faster version to reduce the time it took to complete a backup cycle.
- Review power and
connectivity options. We needed to add uninterrupted power
supplies (UPS) and connectivity for critical servers, network connections and
selected personal computers to keep the most essential applications running in
case of a power outage.
- Document, test and update the
disaster preparedness plan. Part of the Janco Disaster Recovery
and Business Continuity Template plan needs you to include updated
configuration diagrams of the hardware, software and network components to be
used in the recovery. The plan also needed to include logistical details, such
as travel to backup sites and spending authorization for emergency
needs.
- Consider
telecommunications alternatives. Often taken for granted,
telecommunications backup involving redundancy and alternatives needed to be
in place - and in the case of spot outages, redundancy may be enough. For
larger outages, alternative communications vehicles, including wireless
phones, wireless data cards and satellite phones, had to be
considered.
more info
Testing is Critical to Disaster Recovery Planning
Importance
of testing is critical to the disaster recovery and
business continuity planning.
All good disaster recovery
and contingency plans start with having a good solid backup of data.
Although systems and applications can be reinstalled and reconfigured, data
cannot be rebuilt out of thin air. The key to having a good backup is to make
sure the data is correct and can be successfully restored. This is not always as
easy as it seems. One company had such an issue. Their backup administrator did
not correctly follow procedures and when he thought he was doing a backup, he
actually was not writing anything. When they tried to restore a database, they
found out all the tapes were blank. more info
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