Disaster Recovery Plans

Disaster Recovery Plans sometimes focus on the wrong areas. Even this long after 9/11, many organizations remain hopelessly unprepared to quickly recover their IT systems and key business processes in the event of a disaster.

Disaster Recovery Plans – still to be implemented

While interest in disaster-recovery systems peaked in the immediately after the attacks, a lot of IT managers agree they have yet to follow through on many of their intentions. A lack of funding is quoted as the main reason, but other factors include a lack of communication between IT executives and other senior managers, and the realization by some companies that their basic IT infrastructures needed shoring up first.

Disaster Recovery Plans – minimum checklist

Here’s the minimum list of items that are paramount to a good disaster-recovery plan.

• Select a coordinator to develop plan objectives,  a methodology and an overview.
• Identify critical business processes and systems.
• Formulate hardware system and end-user recovery objectives, and identify critical network operations.
• Assess threats — fire, environmental contamination, physical and software security.
• Create a records-retention procedure.
• Implement a back-up and storage strategy.
• Define and test storage , back-up and application systems.
• Identify an  alternate site for end-user s to work out of and contract with provisioning vendors.
• Develop network recovery and relocation strategies, as well as replacement options for hardware and service. 
• Implement a  hot site.
• Define teams, develop notification tree, document disaster-recovery plan and test plan.

Disaster Recovery Plans – What do the analysts say?

“According to a recent Gartner survey, one in three U.S. businesses would lose critical data or operational capabilities if struck by a disaster.”

“Only one in five companies has immediate recovery capabilities, where people can connect with their most important applications, according to a recent Harris Poll of 52 Fortune 1000 company executives.”

In the Harris Poll, for instance, CEOs and other executives said their applications and data could be recovered in 10 hours in the event of a loss. IT managers though, say it would take as long as 30 hours.

Let’s look at an example: I know of one port facility that charges, as a penalty, for every ship in port on the per hour basis. It starts at $50 000 for the first hour and doubles every hour thereafter! Think about what it would cost the organization all up just in penalties even without the loss of income for the organization.

Disaster Recovery Plans – Finally, don’t forget the personnel!

Among the biggest shortcomings in existing disaster-recovery plans, experts say, is that they are too focused on systems and not enough on the people who would use those systems. Typically, a company's employees are untrained on what to do, even if there is a disaster-recovery plan in place.