Creating a Company Disaster Recovery Plan ? Centired.com - For ...

What?s Disaster recovery and should our company have a plan?

Disaster recovery forms a module of your business continuity plan and should sit inside your business plan and your IT business plan for the company paperwork.

Accident Recovery is the IT systems based recovery process for your web server/s (and some of your PC?s) IT systems and applications in such a way that the business can continue working on its core functions as soon as is possible after a major disaster. The full system IT is going to be recovered as quickly as is practical taking into consideration cost and practicalities of the situation.

Before making the decision to do a disaster recovery plan it is a good idea to take a look at how much the business will lose in financial terms in the event of not having the ability to get access to your IT systems. To do this you can take the revenue for year (that?s the total turnover for the year) for the business and divide this by the quantity of working hours in the year. This does not give you a total picture of the potential money loss as things like a loss of goodwill and loss of opportunity are not allowed for, however it does give you a very correct image of the on the ground costs. This mini exercise serves two purposes, first it demonstrates to the ruling body, (management, and the board) the importance and significance of a DRP, second it gives you a framework for budget. If you are able to demonstrate a serious, day-on-day, week-on -week, loss without any access to your IT your management will be rather more likely to put a correct budgeting place for the DRP.

Looking at the server systems and deciding on exactly what is significant is your primary step. You?ll for instance have seven or eight different servers are running a plethora of different applications. During a disaster however you will only be doing the work that keeps the business running and will highly likely not have an interest in creating new earnings.

To that end you are most probably going to want to recover some application servers, you?ll definitely need to get your exchange/email system working, you may not need to recover the older e-mails however you will need the last 3 months with if current e-mail.

You may very well need to get your account system of running however for smaller business in a short term disaster this can often be delayed.

Once the level of server recovery is decided you will then have to plan the recovery. Each server will have a different recovery process and your plan will need to look at each one of those in turn, making certain a backup, testing the recovery from backup and then placing these in a timeline to make sure that you know how long this could take.

So the purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to take a look at the business wants and requirements, to chat to the key business or unit owners and to decide what is you want to use for the very short term while you are trying to get over the disaster. Ultimately you?ll need a re-integration plan for the business to make certain that the change back to your final location (post recovery) is smooth sailing.

Roy Castleman has worked in the Town of London since 1996 in a consultative role in Business IT Support both from a management position and as a hands on IT Support specialist and IT engineer. He has been concerned in several catastrophe recovery events where it?s been necessary to recover a client from a tragedy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 4:15 pm by Roy CAstleman and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Source: http://centired.com/2012/02/creating-a-company-disaster-recovery-plan/

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