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Disaster Recovery Planning Disasters were and always will be a very stressful and annoying experience whenever they happen. The level of damage depends on how prepared companies are for dealing with different collapses. A current, well-planned and well-rehearsed disaster recovery plan often spells the difference between quick returning to work or slow sinking despair abyss. If we are going to discuss this problem without any lyrical digressions then we need a plan. Im going to introduce you a plan on which this paper will be based.
Of course I will enlighten only the most important parts. Lets see what questions do we need to examine: Introduction Definition of disaster and need for a disaster recovery plan Preliminary steps Plan development Training and testing Costs Kinds of recovery Conclusion At first it is essential to understand what is a disaster recovery plan and why it is so important? As for the importance you must know that information technologies were and will be tightly connected with business. Each day computers become more ingrained in every aspect of business operation they now play a growing role in both how business interacts with customers and in generating revenues. Along with this power comes a wealth of issues and problems concerning the reliability and availability of these systems. Today's Internet-driven e-business economy, with its global, round-the-clock requirements, is raising a whole new set of disaster recovery challenges.
Hacker intrusions, network attacks, viruses, spamming, and line failures now can pose greater risks to Information Technology (IT) operations than hurricanes, floods, power outages, and the like. And recovery can depend more on restoring applications than on fixing hardware. Gone are the days when disaster recovery focused on protecting the data center-the heart of a company's heavily entrained IT structure. This IT model began to shift in the 1990 s with the growth of distributed computing and client / server technology. At the same time, information technology became embedded in the fabric of virtually every business. Computing was no longer something done in the back room.
Instead, critical business data could be found on desktop PCs and departmental LANs across the enterprise, as well as in the data center. Now this information is available round the world and around the clock at the click of a mouse-and businesses depend on it. (Disaster Recovery Planning: Strategies for Protecting Critical Information Assets) I think that now you understand all gravity and importance of the disaster recovery planning. Now lets find out what is it? In my own words: disaster recovery planning is is a very complex and labour intensive process, which help to recover damaged system without or with minimal loss at the earliest possible date. Therefore it requires redirection of valuable technical staff and information processing resources as well as appropriate funding. In order to minimize the impact such an undertaking would have on scarce resources, the project for the development and implementation of disaster recovery and business resumption plans should be part of the organizations normal planning activities.
The process of planning Disaster recovery planning is not a two-month project, neither is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan is a live recovery plan. But it depends on you whether the plan will be effective or not. According to Susan Bulgawicz and Charles E. Nolan An information disaster plan addresses information in all forms -- paper, microforms, audio and video tapes, magnetic media, and, most recently, optical disks.
Each medium has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of identification, protection, and restoration. The plan also addresses the increasingly complex and costly equipment used to create, distribute, store and retrieve this information. (Information Disaster Planning: The Larger Perspective) Lets try to examine some preliminary steps in building effective recovery plan. The first step is awareness if you think about recovering plan it as already a very good sign. According to The Disaster Recovery Guide It is good practice for the organization's Board or Governing Body to demonstrate a clear commitment to establishing and maintaining an effective disaster recovery planning process. All management and staff should be informed that a disaster recovery plan is required in order to ensure that essential functions of the organization are able to continue in the event of serious adverse circumstances. So awareness programs for management trainings and the development of a policy for supporting the recovery programs are first important steps.
Security and control within an organization is a continuing concern. It is preferable, from an economic and business strategy perspective, to concentrate on activities that have the effect of reducing the possibility of disaster occurrence, rather than concentrating primarily on minimizing impact of an actual disaster. This phase addresses measures to reduce the probability of occurrence. (Disaster Recovery Planning) It is also important to create a list of all important documents and information. If they contain truly vital information they will have some prerogative in developing of recovery plan. The next step is a step of vital importance it concerns major business areas. A Business Impact Assessment (BIA) of all business units that are part of the business environment enables the project team to: identify critical systems, processes and functions; assess the economic impact of incidents and disasters that result in a denial of access to systems services and other services and facilities; and assess the "pain threshold, " that is, the length of time business units can survive without access to systems, services and facilities.
The BIA Report should be presented to the Steering Committee. This report identifies critical service functions and the timeframes in which they must be recovered after interruption. The BIA Report should then be used as a basis for identifying systems and resources required to support the critical services provided by information processing and other services and facilities. (Disaster Recovery Planning) If you have no such abilities you can compose the list of the organization's major business areas and rank them from the most important to insignificant but steel necessary ones. Detailed definition of requirements is also very important if you want your plan to be really effective. During this phase, a profile of recovery requirements is developed. This profile is to be used as a basis for analyzing alternative recovery strategies.
The profile is developed by identifying resources required to support critical functions identified in Phase 3. This profile should include hardware (mainframe, data and voice communications and personal computers), software (vendor supplied, in-house developed, etc. ), documentation (DP, user, procedures), outside support (public networks, DP services, etc. ), facilities (office space, office equipment, etc. ) and personnel for each business unit. Recovery Strategies will be based on short term, intermediate term and long-term outages. Another key deliverable of this phase is the definition of the plan scope, objectives and assumptions. (Disaster Recovery Planning) After all that preliminary steps disaster recovering plan can be developed. During this step all previous steps are examined, defined and documented.
During this step some changes and implementation can be made. You can upgrade existing data for better perception of procedures required to support selected recovery strategies and alternatives. During this step recovery standart's are usually developed. There are many nuances in development. The Disaster Recovery Guide advice to avoid the black box. The Disaster Recovery Guide explained this on the example We sometimes encounter organizations who already have a plan, BUT have little idea how it was generated.
Further, the plan itself is sometimes too complicated to understand. Imagine how much harder it might be to grasp these requirements in the midst of disaster! The first rule therefore is to UNDERSTAND the plan. At the outset, ensure that you understand how it is to be created. Good plans follow a logical process. Ensure that you follow this. (The Disaster Recovery Guide) The Disaster Recovery Guide also suggests being very careful while using support tools in this area.
Many products exist to help in this area. Unfortunately some require intensive effort, effort which is sometimes deflected from the prime task (creation of the plan). Partly because of this tendency, in recent years there has been a shift towards simplicity. At the vanguard of this shift is a product called The BCP Generator.
This has had a major impact on the disaster recovery planning industry. There are a number of reasons for this: the simplicity factor; its relatively low cost; the process it uses; and various others. The bottom line though is that, through the use of an MS-Word template and accompanying MS-Word Guide, it makes the production of a quality disaster recovery plan much easier and much quicker. For these reasons, the Disaster Recovery Guide itself is now an official distributor of the product, having selected it from a number of offers. (Disaster Recovery Guide) After all aforementioned steps we are ready for the next phase: exposure and risk analysis of your plan.
The main goal is to establish and evaluate alternative strategies and explore the maintenance of the recovering plan. Maintenance of the recovering plan is very important because the plan itself must reflect environmental changes which are supported by this plan. It is critical that existing change management processes are revised to take recovery plan maintenance into account. In areas where change management does not exist, change management procedures will be recommended and implemented. Many recovery software products take this requirement into account. (Disaster Recovery Planning) Anf of course testing is one of the most important parts of our disaster plan recovering.
Testing itself is very useful. Such factors as physical size of the installation, cost to perform the test, time deemed acceptable for contingency processing and recovery, sensitivity of the organization to data processing services...
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Research essay sample on Disaster Recovery Part 1
