An organization’s Disaster Recovery plan is dependent on clearly defined roles. Well-defined roles help to ensure that everyone knows what to do when catastrophe strikes.
Effective DR plans tend to rely on three important groups for executing an effective recovery. These groups include:
1. Management Stakeholders and Business Executives
As a contingent of organizational leaders, this group should always be kept informed about the DR plan and how it is being executed. They sponsor the plan’s development and must agree with the process and decision-making responsibilities outlined. They should also learn of changes or updates to the plan on an appropriate basis and should be informed of any incidents that may morph into potential disasters, before they actually become disasters.
The management stakeholders and executives may also be responsible for declaring an emergency and are definitely in the notification chain “at-time-of-disaster”. They will need to be informed of progress, issues and recovery status.
2. Management and Suppliers Involved with Escalation Situations
This group, which may overlap to some extent with the management stakeholders and executives group, is responsible for righting the disaster plan if it looks to be going off course. Its members are expected to assist with acquiring extra resources or assistance, if there are problems or unexpected impediments. This likely included members and management of external agencies, to ensure everything is on track.
Even staunch preparation cannot totally eliminate surprises during the recovery phase of a crisis, but the management involved with escalation situations group is in place to counteract any unforeseen problems. If, for instance, internal technical staff are unavailable, this group would be tasked with locating substitutes. If a key role-player is on vacation, the group finds their replacement. This unit handles any form of special request or exception to the plan.
3. Recovery Team
The recovery team is made up of two parts: people involved with the technical recovery of systems, and users.
The technical recovery portion of the team is usually made up of IT infrastructure and applications people – or external service providers with relevant expertise in a critical area – who are responsible for ensuring that communications are functional, the computing infrastructure is brought online, applications are activated, and the recovery site is instantaneously operational.
The users required are those who own the systems from the business side of operations. They test, validate, and verify systems during recovery or post-disaster to judge whether or not they are functioning at or below the pre-disaster level.
