Disaster Recovery Guide
Business Continuity Planning
ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant
What is Disaster Recovery and how does the Disaster Recovery Planning Template help?
This DRP Template can be used for any sized enterprise.
The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley 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):
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Web Site Disaster Recovery Planning Form
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Department Disaster Recovery Activation Workbook
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Quick Reference Guide
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Team Alert List (Form)
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DRP Team Responsibilities
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DRP Team Checklist
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Critical Function(s) Definition
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Normal Business Hour Response Procedures
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After Hours Response Procedures
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DRP Location(s) Definition
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DRP Recovery Procedures
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Notification Procedures
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Notification Call List (Form)
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Vendor Disaster Recovery Questionnaire
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Vendor Phone List Form Updated
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Key Customer Notification Form
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Critical Resources to be Retrieved Form
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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:
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Plan Introduction
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Business Impact Analysis - including a sample impact matrix
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DRP Organization Responsibilities pre and post disaster - drp checklist
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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.
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Recovery Strategy including approach, escalation plan process and decision points
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Disaster Recovery Procedures in a check list format
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Plan Administration Process
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Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points
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Job Description for DRP Manager (3 pages long) - entire team job descriptions are available.
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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
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Disaster Recovery Manager Responsibilities
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Distribution of the Disaster Recovery Plan
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Maintenance of the Business Impact Analysis
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Training of the Disaster Recovery Team
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Testing of the plan
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Evaluation of the plan tests
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Maintenance of the plan
This template is not for resale or re-distribution - Disaster Recovery Planning Template Disaster Recovery Template
Disaster Recovery Guide / Business Continuity News
Metrics for Organizations with no Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan
According to Janco Associates, an International Disaster
Recovery - Business Continuity consultancy the most common form of enterprise
wide disaster is related to power outages.
Janco has found that in disaster recovery and business continuity cases
it has reviewed the following is true:
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Over one third companies take more than a day to recover from a major power outage caused by events like hurricanes and extensive disasters.
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Over eleven percent of companies take more than a week to recover from these events.
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The typical time to reconfigure a network that has not been planned for can take up to 72 hours - if the resources are available.
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Data that is lost (not backup up electronically) can take weeks to re-enter if there is paper trail and if there is none the data can be lost forever.
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Over 85 percent of companies that experience a computer disaster and do not have a Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity Plan go out of business within 18 months.
Disaster Recovery Planning Scope
All Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning need to encompass how employees will communicate, where they will go and how they will keep doing their jobs. The details can vary greatly, depending on the size and scope of a company and the way it does business. For some businesses, issues such as supply chain logistics are most crucial and are the focus on the plan. For others, information technology may play a more pivotal role, and the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan may have more of a focus on systems recovery.
But the critical point is that neither element can be ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in isolation from each other. At its heart, BC/DR is about constant communication. Business leaders and IT leaders should work together to determine what kind of plan is necessary and which systems and business units are most crucial to the company. Together, they should decide which people are responsible for declaring a disruptive event and mitigating its effects. Most importantly, the plan should establish a process for locating and communicating with employees after such an event. In a catastrophic event (Hurricane Katrina being a recent example), the plan will also need to take into account that many of those employees will have more pressing concerns than getting back to work.
- more infoDisaster Recovery Metric Defined
A proposed overall metric for Disaster Recovery is Total Time to Disaster Recovery (TTDR), which is the time it takes to backup the data, deduplication of the data, replication of the data at remote DR site, and then finally recovery of the data so it is in an operational state. This metric is all-inclusive as it takes into consideration every aspect of the backup and recovery environment into account when performing a true disaster recovery.
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Recovery and data replication are the much more important ones issues that need to be considered. It is great to backup data fast, but if it takes three times as long to recover it, try to explain that to your CIO when a major application goes out and he is standing over your shoulder waiting for the data to be recovered.
TTDR includes:
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Backing up the data
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De-duplicating the data, and
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Replicating the data to the remote disaster recovery site
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Setting the data and the applications to an operational state
Backup For Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Now Easier
Quantum
Corp. a global specialist in backup, recovery and archive, announced two new
product releases designed to help end users solve the challenges of data backup
and recovery across distributed environments by improving local data protection
and disaster recovery (DR) while streamlining management and reducing costs. The
latest addition of disk backup solutions with deduplication and replication, the
appliance is optimized for remote and branch office environments that are part
of a distributed enterprise. The other software product release provides new
centralized, multi-tier management and reporting capabilities for unifying
backup resources, including disk and tape.
Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Basics
The basics of a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan are defined in the Janco Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template. They are:
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Develop the contingency planning policy statement. A formal department or agency policy provides the authority and guidance necessary to develop an effective contingency plan.
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Conduct the business impact analysis (BIA). The BIA helps to identify and prioritize critical IT systems and components.
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Identify preventive controls. Measures taken to reduce the effects of system disruptions can increase system availability and reduce contingency life cycle costs.
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Develop recovery strategies. Thorough recovery strategies ensure that the system may be recovered quickly and effectively following a disruption.
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Develop an IT contingency plan. The contingency plan should contain detailed guidance and procedures for restoring a damaged system.
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Plan testing, training and exercises. Testing the plan identifies planning gaps, whereas training prepares recovery personnel for plan activation; both activities improve plan effectiveness and overall agency preparedness.
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Plan maintenance. The plan should be a living document that is updated regularly to remain current with system enhancements.
New Devices Make Backup Easier to Implement
Backup and recovery while complex may be easier as media vendors release new advanced products. While many external drives now come with a physical push-button backup option, a new genre of backup devices is emerging one-touch USB flash drives that combine the convenience of small size with relatively sophisticated backup applications for data protection.
The latest to arrive is the SanDisk Ultra Backup USB Flash Drive, which combines push-button backups with SanDisk's U3 smart-drive technology that allows a user to store Windows PC user preferences, profiles and settings as well as download and launch a limited number of applications from the flash drive.
- more infoDisaster Recovery Business Continuity Templates Addresses Mid-sized Requirement
Mid-sized businesses have long struggled to protect their IT systems. Many firms are inadequately protected and mistakenly think that a disaster is rare and will not happen to them anytime soon. There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding regarding what disaster recovery encompasses and how to implement it effectively. The Janco Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Temple provides CIO and CFO with tools that address minor and major disaster scenarios. This template also clarifies what true disaster recovery means and how backup and high availability are not true DR solutions. Janco studies the newest technology trends, such as virtualization and storage replication, which make powerful DR solutions attainable and affordable even for mid-sized businesses.
- more info