To be honest, there is no standard template that you can just drop in and use. The reason for this is that every business is different and the reason for having a recovery plan will be different for each business as a result.
I can however give a few sage pointers given my greying, balding scalp and a few years putting stuff together lol! First of all, define which IT resources are mission critical to the business, which ones are important, but if they were out of action for a bit you could cope, and which ones are, well, you might notice if you could not access them. So start dividing apps into buckets like that. Next question, why are they not available? Actually, it does not matter, flood, fire, data corruption, the reason is irrelevant, the key issue is that you cannot get to the applications or data. So forget the why, and simplify your planning ;-) Now for the two most important questions in designing your plan. The acronyms are RTO and RPO (Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective). Basically how long can a business survive without a function provided by IT (think a recruitment company without Exchange), and also how much data can realistically be lost. So if your power goes out at 4:00 PM and you have uncommitted transactions in SQL, can you afford to lose them. The beauty here is this is not up to you to decide, you need sponsorship from business management to determine this. So you need to explain where you are now, how long it would take to recover, and how much data you might lose based on your current situation, and pose the question around where does management want to be in terms of RPO and RTO. If it's a few days for both, your tape solution is fine, if not, then you need to start looking at off-site replication technologies, disk syncing, and provisioning WAN connectivity to allow for the loss of a single service all the way up to an entire data centre or office. Because you went to management and had them make the decision around RPO/RTO you can now go back to them and say if this is what you want, here's your financial outlay to achieve it. It's an insurance policy, and nothing more, so it's up to them to pay the premium or not. BUT I hate it when a business give DR to IT. Why? They are missing the real picture here, which is business continuity (of which DR is only a part). Press communication, staff communication, consumer and supplier confidence, there is a whole host of things that need to go into this, and when a company puts it all on IT, that is plain wrong. Last bit of advice for your DR Plan, put a communication plan in it, and state clearly that whoever is executing the plan when the need arises is not to be disturbed, have someone else on point to relay information about the recovery process back to the business and leave the person implementing the recovery free to do so. (take their phone away) And whatever you do, keep the plan up to date, test and retest, and have multiple copies in printed form at various locations so that neither corruption of the electronic copy, nor fire or flood can destroy the only printed copy you have. Hope that helps. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:mailvor...@gmail.com] Sent: 07 March 2011 17:44 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Basic Disaster Recovery Plan Template On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:33 AM, <gro...@beachcomp.com> wrote: >>> Does anyone have a basic (5 pages or so) disaster recovery plan or >>> template they wouldn't mind sharing with me? >> >> http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Basic+Disaster+Recovery+Plan+Template > > Thanks Ben.. but I already went through the first 5 pages before > posting here. I found several templates in the results. Since you're apparently not happy with any of those, you obviously need to better specify your requirements for the template you want. You haven't given members of this list any more information then I just gave Google. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
