What is Disaster Recovery

Information on Disaster Recovery

A disaster recovery is a response to a declared disaster or a regional disaster. It is the restoration or recovery of an entire Agent computer. A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is to deal with potential disasters.

Disaster Plan Just as a disaster is an event that makes the continuation of normal functions impossible, a disaster recovery plan consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized, and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions.

Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs; it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention.

The Disaster Recovery Planning Template (DRP) 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 Plan Template
Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Work Plan

With the template is a 3 page Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager. The Disaster Recovery Plan Template PREMIUM Bundle contains 11 additional key job descriptions.

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

The DRP template includes everything needed to customize the Disaster Recovery Plan to fit your specific requirement.

Disaster Plan / Business Continuity News

Business Continuity Planning 101

January 29th, 2012

The basic process for developing a business continuity plan is:

Create a business continuity planning team: Members should be from operations management, the chief security officer, the IT department, legal staff, and human resources.
Define leadership roles: Determine which executives and employees are critical to operating the business (and supporting customers) that need to have access to key systems and information at all time.
Assume the worst and plan for needed extra capacity: Before an event occurs, businesses need to plan ahead for increased network bandwidth and secured remote access requirements.
Define emergency voice and data communications solutions: There are many to choose from, but a SSL VPN is one of the leading solutions to provide flexible, remote access, which is essential to any business continuity plan.
Define access points for operations, network and IT: Create a business continuity portal for employees and partners. If the company has an Intranet, this site becomes command central from which employees can access information - HR policies, emergency contacts and a "start here" feature should be included.
Contract for a secondary back-up site: Should the primary site be unavailable, companies should have a real-time mirror of data and staff housed at a secure facility.
Backup data: In the event that the secondary site is unavailable, organizations should plan for multiple layers of failover.
Plan to utilize smartphones and tablets: With mobile devices and "wireless networks", IT departments can leverage these tools to ensure complete connectivity in times of emergencies.
Pre-arrange Internet meeting capabilities: In the event of an office closure, employees still need to communicate internally or with external parties (i.e. suppliers, customers). Implement the technology before it is needed
Review number of sites and VPN gateways: Conducting an annual audit to provide a complete picture of your network and the ability to address problem areas before a disaster strikes.
Test and test again: These 'fire drills' enable the business continuity team to see how the current system is working, especially when employees are accessing information from remote locations (i.e. from home, a relative's house, and hotel). Once complete, those in management, IT and human resources can modify their business continuity plan accordingly.
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Core backup and recovery concerns

January 20th, 2012
CIOs and IT Managers need to consider manadated compliance requirements

Question that need to be answered are:

Is our data safe in transit and at rest?

What prevents hackers from gaining access to our data?

Is our data properly handled, stored, and deleted?

Who can access our data?

What are the benchmark measurements?

Is our data backup strategy compliant?

Will our recovery be successful?
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How long should it take to create a business continuity plan?

January 7th, 2012

Business continuity planning is a continual process, and not something that is done once and filed away to be used in an emergency. In error many organisations treat the creation of a business continuity plan as a normal project, subsequently deploying the plan and handing over to an operational department for maintenance.

In most organizations, DR is the quintessential complex, unfamiliar task. Disasters happen so rarely that recovery operations are the opposite of routine. What's more the myriad, interconnected data, application and other resources that must be recovered after a disaster make recovery an exceptionally difficult and error-prone effort.

How to create a business continuity plan...
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Which states had the fewest major weather disasters

December 14th, 2011
The U.S. has sustained 112 weather/climate disasters over the past quarter century in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total standardized losses for the 112 events exceed $750 billion, according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climatic Data Center.

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Foundation necessary for disaster recovery and business continuity

November 5th, 2011
As an essential foundation step toward disaster recovery and business continuity readiness, are these best practices:

Extending management technologies that automate the process of asset management, system configuration, and software distribution (This reduced the number of steps that required hands-on intervention and reduced IT staff time.)

Constraining their environment to a finite number of standard processors, operating systems, database products - making it easier to maintain and update

Consolidating servers over a long-term road map, reducing the number of server "footprints" that had to be maintained and updated

Standardizing IT practices, especially management of settings and configurations

Providing protected storage space within the organization's storage resources and establishing rules for backup of mission-critical data (This ensured adequate capacity for backup and recovery procedures and for restart of applications.)

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