Disaster Recovery Plans

A disaster recovery plan (DRP), is a part of the business continuity plan that focuses on the IT aspect of the organization. It is a planning paper that documents the methodology or the process a company should follow to deal with potential crises. A disaster recovery plan is more or less an organized way to deal with a problematic occurrence which could be either man-made or a natural calamity. When an entire business sector or an individual company is caught off guard without any preparedness or a contingency backup plan, it could result in a long term slowdown of the company's production, and affect its revenue generation. But more than that, it also at times affects the company's credibility, as it seems that it is not ready to take on and tackle problems. Of course, this does not apply to natural disasters. Emergency preparedness and data recovery is the key to successful recovery planning.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster recovery is an increasingly important aspect of all business computing. As businesses now span the globe, the systems that connect them are becoming more complex. As a consequence, any one aspect of the system or the network could go wrong. Hence, a need for a structured recovery plan. The basic objective of a disaster recovery plan is to ensure stability to the organization by protecting it from unforeseeable future disasters. The plan should be comprehensive enough to minimize the impact of damage or disruption of operations or services, and must play a vital role in ensuring a speedy recovery after a disaster. Besides doing the obvious, a recovery plan should also provide for a standby system, a testing period, minimize the decision making process, and provide a general sense of security among its employees.

Risk Assessment
Risk analysis is imperative and is also the first step towards prioritizing recovery. All kinds of risk need to be studied; computer or network failures, accidental data deletion, virus threats, and all other natural disasters. Mostly threats are categorized as probable and impact, and further classified as high, medium or low. Most risk analyzers determine needs as per the worst case scenarios, this defines the probable aspect of planning, whereas impact assess the consequences resulting from the loss of services, operations, and information.

Budget Allocation
The disaster recovery planning committee needs to analyze the costs related to potential threats. Besides this, it also needs to assess and allocate resources for developing back ups, testings, overall planning and setting up of the recovery plan. While deciding upon the budget, it is important to understand whether all that is being spent upon would reap any benefits in getting the business back on track. Many business houses complain of wrong recovery priorities being allocated, which in time of a real disaster prove unworthy of the time and money spent on it.

Develop the Plan
Once the risk is assessed and plan is approved, it is time for its actual development. Development involves determination of key functional operations relating to personnel assigned for recovery, documentation, systems and network, policies and procedures. Coordination among the recovery team is also planned at this stage. The duration of recovery under different scenarios also needs to be worked out. For companies that are networked vastly, different center locations are allocated recovery, until the disaster struck center can start up again. The entire recovery plan should be documented in a detailed manner. All aspects, no matter how small should be scripted. Testing criteria and procedures are also defined and documented in this phase.

Test Disaster Recovery Plan
Testing is essential to understanding the working of the recovery plan. Loopholes as well as faulty plans can only be identified when an actual test is conducted. Frequent testing will allow the recovery plan to be updated, and adapt to all changing scenarios of the environment around it.

Disaster recovery plans should be made an integral part of all business management polices and procedures. The continuity of a business is dependent upon awareness of potential threats, ability to to minimize disruptions, and the capability to recover expediently and successfully. One can even use a disaster recovery plan software or a data recovery software to plan recovery. Disaster recovery plans are company specific, hence it is difficult to find a disaster recovery plan example specific to your needs. They need to be developed keeping specific company requirements in mind.