Disaster recovery plan is the detailed process for recovery of technology infrastructure critical to an company and organization after a disaster. Disaster recovery mainly focuses on the IT or technology systems that is crucial to the functions of business.
Disaster recovery plan
With the rapid growth of the Internet and IT technology, organizations of all sizes became further dependent on the continuous availability of their IT systems, This increasing dependence on IT systems contributed to the further growth of various disaster recovery related industries, from high-availability solutions to hot-site facilities. Companies now are aware of the importance of building a successful business continuity plan preparing for business disasters.
Disasters can be classified in two broad categories. The first is natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes. The second category is disasters incurred by human errors. These include hazardous material spills, infrastructure failure or bio-terrorism. These disasters can be greatly reduced or transferred if details actions and preventions are taken.
During the process of developing your disaster recovery plan, it is important to conduct a thorough risk analysis of your business operations. List all the possible risks that threaten system uptime and evaluate how imminent they are. You need also determine which of your threats are the most likely to occur and prioritize them using a simple system: rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact. In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high.
Your disaster recovery plan should be related to your business impact analysis. In fact, the plan should be a subset of business continuity plan . Business impact analysis is the study and assessment of effects to the organization in the event of the loss or degradation of business functions resulting from a destructive event. Such loss may be financial or non-financial factors such as human resources etc
Disaster recovery plan template
Disaster recover plan example: In your example, you need to structure your template as: Plan Objectives, Recovery Teams and Responsibilities, which you should list all responsibilities of each department and their roles, What To Do in the Event of a Disaster, Recovery Scenarios, Recovery Activities etc
The first thing to consider in the disaster recovery plan template is the plan objectives and the personnel responsible for the plan. In the part, you need to give the plan objectives, for example, the plan is to minimize interruptions to the normal operations, limit the extent of disruption and damage etc. You need also give details of human resources, personnel, their name, position, addresses and contact details.
The second key area to consider is the strategy to tackle the unexpected. In the section, you need to give detail instructions on following key area: emergency response procedures which is to document the appropriate emergency response to a fire, natural disaster, or any other activity in order to protect lives and limit damage; backup operations procedures which is to ensure that essential data processing operational tasks can be conducted after the disruption; recovery actions procedures which is to facilitate the rapid restoration of a data processing system following a disaster.
The last key area to consider in the disaster recovery plan template is the testing of the disaster recovery plan. For any effective contingency planning, it is important to test and evaluate the plan regularly. Data processing operations are volatile in nature, resulting in frequent changes to equipment, programs, and documentation. These actions make it critical to consider the plan as a changing document.