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Disaster Planning Template
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Disaster Recovery Plan Template and
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Can Every Disaster Be Planned For?
The world may be too complex for organizations to protect
against every disaster Flowing directly out of contingency policies, the contingency
plan details the roles and responsibilities of departments and individuals in
keeping technology systems available, as well as the procedures for restoring IT
systems during an emergency. Other key elements of contingency planning include
resource requirements, training needs, the frequency of training exercises and
testing, maintenance schedules, and data-backup schedules. The phases of a contingency plan include the initial
notification and activation when the emergency strikes, restoration and recovery
once emergency teams have been mobilized, and finally a return to normal
operation - or available to help organizations develop and maintain accurate
inventories of IT resources. Vendors offer modules that use software agents to
scour the IT infrastructure, storing details about hardware and software assets
and their configuration parameters in configuration management
databases.
Disaster Planning in a Recessions - Risks Faced
IT
departments face flat budgets and, at the same time, find that their
organizations have become increasingly dependent on uninterrupted access to
business-critical data. In today's world, prudent IT administrators prepare to recover from two types
of disasters as part of a complete Business Continuity and Availability (BC and
A) plan. The first is a localized disaster, affecting a building or a small set
of buildings. The second is a wide-area disaster, such as a hurricane or a
regional power outage. Enterprises must replicate data to alternate data
centers, located at a variety of distances from the primary data center, while
maintaining acceptable data currency standards. This Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) can be used as a Disaster Planning template for any enterprise. The Disaster Recovery template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant. The Disaster Planning Template comes as both a Word and static fully indexed PDF document and includes:
Preparation for Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity in light of SOX has two primary parts. The first is putting systems in place to completely protect all financial and other data required to meet the reporting regulations and to archive the data to meet future requests for clarification of those reports. The second is to clearly and expressly document all these procedures so that in the event of a SOX audit, the auditors clearly see that the DR plan exists and will appropriately protect the data. more info
Disaster Planning Tips to Keep You Doors Open
What are the some quick tip for the disaster planning processes: Consider this, almost 40% of small businesses that close due to a disaster
event never re-open. What would you do if the building your business is located
within was damaged or destroyed in a disaster? Where would you go to continue
providing your customers with your business services? Would you be prepared and
have the correct resources, databases, contact information and other necessary
items to adapt to these changes? Having a disaster plan that identifies these
important items will help ensure your business is prepared to survive during
unexpected and difficult times! As historic floodwaters start to recede along the Mississippi and other
Midwestern rivers, local businesses in affected communities like Cedar Falls,
Iowa, are busy assessing the impact on IT equipment and whether disaster
recovery plans stood the test. A maker of computer games in Cedar Falls, may be permanently displaced after
Cedar River floodwaters reached 6 feet in its administrative offices and 5.5
feet in an adjoining warehouse. The company sustained about $250,000 in damage
to inventory. The firm's president said all 65 employees are now working temporarily in
borrowed offices in three facilities. As the floodwaters approached on June 9, employees scurried to save 120 PCs,
80 monitors and eight servers. Three high-end printers could not be removed in
time. The company plans to revise his disaster recovery plan. "When a river comes
up 6 feet higher than it ever has before, it's tough to have that foresight,"
they said. "But it is probably going to happen again." A software development company has plans to deal with tornados and electrical
outages, but executives never dreamed they would have to contend with the Cedar
River surpassing 500-year-flood levels. "Going through this experience [will]
make those plans [more] than just part of an IT checklist," he said. A key lesson learned was that companies must prepare for employees to miss
work to help families and communities after natural disasters.
After You Recover from a Disaster You Must Handle the Media
After companies recover from a disaster, they need to
manage their images. Planet.com, an Internet Services provider, did
not do that after a major fire. Nothing was posted on their site.
The only news was on a media site (IDG - Computerworld). The story is
(Computerword) - The Planet.com Internet Services Inc. hopes
to have all 9,000 of its servers in its Houston data center back online later
tonight following a blast that shut down the facility on Saturday
afternoon. When firefighters arrived at around 5 p.m., they could see
"light smoke" at the Planet data center -- the aftermath of an explosion in a
network gear room that produced enough force to move walls. Sprinklers quickly
doused whatever flames erupted; the fire was attributed to an electrical problem
with a transformer, according to a Houston Fire Department spokeswoman. There
were no injuries. Although the data center says it has power systems that "are
designed to run uninterrupted" and a "fully redundant network operations center"
with diesel generators, the electrical problem exposed an apparent Achilles'
heel in its business continuity planning. Firefighters told data center workers
to turn off all the power, according Planet spokeswoman Yvonne Donaldson. That
meant the servers, even though they weren't damaged, were offline.
Approximately 6,000 of the affected servers were returned to
service early this morning. Another 3,000 were due to return online by tonight,
the company said. The Planet staff provided updates on the restoration on its
customer forum site, including a message from CEO and Chairman Douglas Erwin,
who wrote that some servers will be relying on generator power for a week until
normal utility connections are restored. The Planet operates more than 40,000 servers at multiple
data centers and hosts more than 3 million Web sites. While Planet data center staff worked to restore service,
users -- many of them small business owners -- wrote of their frustrations over
the outage on forum posts. Questions about the data center's backup capabilities
were raised, as well. One person, flynnibus, wrote: "You shouldn't put all your
money into one bank -- and you shouldn't put all your servers in one DC [data
center] if you want to be truly resilient."
Many Disasters are Magnified by Human Error
(Computerworld) A disk failure in a Sun Microsystems Inc. server caused
the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM database to crash for nearly 20
hours last week, according to the FAA. Because of the disk failure, information had to be delivered to pilots
through local air traffic controllers and alternate systems, including a Web
site set up to disseminate the most up-to-date information, said a manager of
aeronautical information management for the FAA. However, flight safety was
never a problem, the FAA said. "What happened was the drive in an end-of-life Sun box failed in the middle
of updating the information on the hard drive, so it screwed up the database,"
the FAA said. That was the beginning of the complications. The FAA team replaced the
hardware and the drive which got the system running again. The FAA already had the equipment to replace in place, they just had not done
it yet, and that is why the hardware recovery was quite simple according to the
FAA. But even then, the system was running slowly, or in a deteriorated mode, and
it got so bad that his team decided to reopen the problem to see what was going
on. As the technicians were working to fix the database, they decided to go to
the backup system. As they did that, they soon realized they had written the
error over to the backup system and had corrupted that system as
well.
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contingency, but with the right
technologies, clear service-level expectations, practical recovery policies
enterprises can minimize the business consequences when the unexpected
happens.
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