Disaster Recovery Guide
Business Continuity Planning

ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799, COBIT, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant

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The Disaster Recovery Guide can be used for any sized enterprise.   The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley, Cobit, ISO, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.  The complete package includes:

  • Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Template
  • Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
  • Work Plan
  • Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program

New are (Version History):

  • Web Site Disaster Recovery Planning Form

  • Department Disaster Recovery Activation Workbook

    • Quick Reference Guide

    • Team Alert List (Form)

    • DRP Team Responsibilities

    • DRP Team Checklist

    • Critical Function(s) Definition

    • Normal Business Hour Response Procedures

    • After Hours Response Procedures

    • DRP Location(s) Definition

    • DRP Recovery Procedures

    • Notification Procedures

    • Notification Call List (Form)

  • Vendor Disaster Recovery Questionnaire

  • Vendor Phone List Form Updated

  • Key Customer Notification Form

  • Critical Resources to be Retrieved Form

  • Business Continuity Off-Site Materials Form

With the template is a 3 page Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager.  The  PREMIUM Bundle contains 14 key job descriptions.

Clients can also subscribe to Janco's DRP update service and receive all updates to the DRP Template*. 

The DRP template is over 180 pages and includes everything needed to customize it to fit your specific requirement.  The electronic document includes proven written text and examples for the following major sections:

  • Plan Introduction

  • Business Impact Analysis - including a sample impact matrix

  • DRP Organization Responsibilities pre and post disaster - drp checklist

  • Backup Strategy for Data Centers, Departmental File Servers, Wireless Network servers, Data at Outsourced Sites, Desktops (In office and "at home"), Laptops and PDA's.

  • Recovery Strategy including approach, escalation plan process and decision points

  • Disaster Recovery Procedures in a check list format

  • Plan Administration Process

  • Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points

  • Job Description for DRP Manager (3 pages long) - entire team job descriptions are available.

  • Work Plan to modify and implement the template.  Included is a list of deliverables for each task.

There is a extensive section that shows how to conduct full test of the DRP.  It includes

  • Disaster Recovery Manager Responsibilities

  • Distribution of the Disaster Recovery Plan

  • Maintenance of the Business Impact Analysis

  • Training of the Disaster Recovery Team

  • Testing of the plan

  • Evaluation of the plan tests

  • Maintenance of the plan

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This template is not for resale or re-distribution - Disaster Recovery Planning Template Disaster Recovery Template

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disaster Recovery Guide / Business Continuity News



Bank of America site goes down....

Bank of America was investigating an outage that affected an unknown number of customers but had ruled out a cyberattack, a representative said. Their disaster recovery plan was not activated.

"Our online-banking service is available," spokeswoman Anne Pace said in a telephone interview on Friday afternoon. "We ruled out a cyberattack, but are working with partners to determine the root cause."

Disaster Recovery Plan Template Business Continuity
The Standard - Over 3,000 Companies World Wide have chosen this DRP/BCP Template

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Checks  found the site down during the morning and afternoon, as late as 2:50 p.m. PST. Several people reported the outage to and Business Insider reported that the site was down most of the morning. Several others reported that they were able to get through to the site, although at least one said it was sluggish.

Bank of America's Twitter account was reporting that "Our Web site is available. However, some customers are having intermittent issues with access. We are working to determine the root cause."

One person reported that he discovered a work-around: "I tried going to the site via my mobile device, and it works! So then I typed the URL that my mobile device uses into my desktop browser, and I can get in. So it doesn't seem that the Web site, per se, is down, only the 'normal' entry portal?"

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DR Plan tools defined in Janco DR Template

Your DR plan should be updated with tools that are collaborative in nature, enable teams and people to communicate remotely at any time, over any channel, and without dependency upon your IT infrastructure.Best Offer Bundle

Emergency notification and communication technology should provide not only an automated solution for message delivery, but also:

  • Enable companies to reach end users and allow them to respond anytime and from anywhere.
  • Enable notification over any text enabled or voice enabled device (inbound/outbound).
  • Provide local and global notification capabilities.
  • Provide a centralized, interactive tool for executing your DR plan, monitoring tasks and enabling real time coordination of resources and status updates.

Many organizations' DR efforts fall short once initial notifi cation has occurred. Rarely do organizations have a centralized method for employees, DR teams, executives, customers, etc., to access the DR Plan, task lists, or documents necessary to recovery efforts such as contracts and purchase orders. Prior to purchasing the Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template, one large regional health care provider complained that once notifcation occurred, they were not able to coordinate the simplest of tasks. In a crisis situation, often times employees have no method to stay apprised of information. Stories abound of disaster recovery teams that become occupied answering employee phone calls and answering basic questions about a crisis, and are unable to focus on their primary task  - managing through a crisis to recovery.

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How a CIO should chose a backup site

 Disater Plan Site SelectionDisasters cost money, interrupt business operations and may cause the enterprise or government agency to fail, which makes planning a business continuity issue. Disasters can interfere with or even terminate IT and communications services. It does not matter whether the disaster affects the enterprise, government or service provider. Floods, fire, volcanoes, earthquakes and other events can destroy a primary and backup site if they are too close together.

Telecom service providers can offer expert advice on where to locate a backup facility and should position themselves with CIOs to offer both consulting and services. After all, they have experience planning for their own primary and backup facilities, as well.

A CIO's selection of the backup site location will always have risks and liabilities attached to the decision. Adequate and reliable communications to the backup site and communications between the primary and backup sites are what most service providers can successfully offer to the CIO.

      

In choosing a backup site, CIO's must first determine how big a disaster plan for and budget for it. The level of disaster planning increases as you goes down the following list:

  • Building closed/evacuated
  • Loss of power
  • Loss of communications
  • Facility damaged/destroyed
  • Community disaster (10-to-30 mile range)
  • Regional disaster (30-to100 mile range)
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Cloud backup as a strategy for Disaster Planning

One of the biggest challenges of managing a backup infrastructure is that no one wants the job. In large companies, the backup administrator position is an ever-revolving door often staffed with junior people. In smaller companies, backing up the infrastructure is a peripheral duty that is often ignored. The result is the same in both cases: bad backups.

One potential solution to this problem is cloud backup services - or managed backup services, depending on your preferred terminology. The idea is simple: Outsource this undesirable part of IT to a company whose staff specializes in it and you’ll never look back.

Record Management   Backup Policy

Cloud backup services take advantage of many of the technologies mentioned here, but allow customers to use the service without having to manage the process. Instead, customers simply install a piece of software on the systems being backed up, and the cloud backup service does the rest. But as with any backup system, make sure you have a way to verify that backups are working the way they’re supposed to be working.

The unglamorous world of backups is like the rest of IT: You never hear from anyone until something goes wrong. Modernizing your infrastructure, when planned and executed carefully, can reduce your liability dramatically. But as you make those improvements, remember the backup mantra: Test everything and believe nothing.

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Backing up now much faster

Seagate Technology LLC today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas released its first USB SuperSpeed 3.0-enabled external hard disk drive, the BlackArmor PS110, which has up to three times the performance of its previous USB 2.0 products.

Record Management   Backup Policy

The BlackArmor all-in-one USB 3.0 toolkit packages a 500GB 7200rpm, 2.5-inch portable hard drive, power cable and PC express card to enable USB 2.0-enabled laptops to perform with the 4.8Gbit/sec speed that USB 3.0 specifications allow.

While USB 3.0 theoretically represents a 10-fold improvement in I/O

speed over USB 2.0, Seagate said the data speed of its BlackArmor USB 3.0 portable drive is based on "real-world testing." The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface allows transfer of large files to and from the external drive at sustained transfer rates of 100MB/sec.

For example, Seagate claims that a 25GB high-definition movie can be transferred in just four minutes on the BlackArmor USB 3.0 drive. That compares to the 14 minutes the transfer would take using a traditional USB 2.0 drive.

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More than 75% of all American firms have DRPs in place

According to AT&T's 2008 Business Continuity Study, more than 75 percent of American companies have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place, with the largest enterprises leading the way at 88 percent and the smallest (100 employees or fewer) at 75 percent.

Disaster Business Continuity

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These percentages are significantly higher than just four years ago, according to the same study. That is not surprising, given the dire predictions of business failure following a major disruption or loss of data. Although current figures are not readily available, past studies indicated that many small to mid-size businesses never reopen following a major data loss, and more than half close within two years after the event. And that was during a period of economic expansion. For companies locked into one of the sluggish or soft areas of today's economy, failure rates would almost certainly be higher.

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Security and DRP play a role in CIO Infrastructure Design

IT Infrastructure, Strategy, & Charter TemplateDesigning IT Infrastructure requires CIOs to consider the globalized world they are now in. It is necessary and valuable for CIOs to understand the fundamental trends that are pushing businesses to redesign their operations around this new reality.  Factors they need to consider are:

  • Security - With the growing importance of digital applications and data, the sources of threats to enterprise data have multiplied dramatically. Everything from natural disasters to criminals to corrupt sources within the company might try to steal or corrupt data. While businesses do everything that they can to stop these threats in the first place, they still must be prepared to recover from these threats as quickly as possible.
  • Business Continuity and Disaster Planning - As businesses have expanded the need for anytime, anywhere application access has become a requirement. At the same time, “follow the sun” (global 24/7) operations have shrinking maintenance windows and a need for applications to be running at all times. Delay or loss of data for any reason – system failure, natural disasters – has a domino-like effect across the entire organization, at any time of the day or night.
  • Flexibility - Most businesses now operate across international borders and CIOs must be able to respond to opportunities and challenges faster than ever before. CIOs are usually battling well-resourced organizations that may be based where the opportunity originated, or another globalizing company that is reaching out for new opportunities. In order to compete, a business has to be faster to deliver a product or service as good, or better, than that of potentially any other company in the world.
  • Simplicity - Increases in technology have typically led to increased complexity. While per unit costs of technology are always decreasing, in aggregate companies see an increase in cost. With the pressure on IT to act less as a cost center and more as a way to increase the profitability of business units, just adding more storage, more bandwidth, or additional technologies throughout the organization is no longer an acceptable approach to managing information technology. Successful CIOs are investing in numerous technologies including; continuous data protection, virtualization, and wireless connectivity.  They are trying slim down IT’s footprint while increasing their business’s competitive advantages. The CIO is typically in a difficult position, assessing where to try and cut costs while still moving forward with a plan to continually enhance IT services to the business.
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