You’ve decided your organization’s Disaster Recovery plan needs some updating, so now what? Perhaps the best way to go is with the help of an internal specialist or a good DR consultant, who will guide your organization’s DR update through a seven-step “refresh” program.
1. Quick Scan
The DR consultant will take an overview of any existing DR or business continuity plans you have, and measure that against your business’ regulatory requirements, to establish a risk and threat assessment, business impact assessment and base needs analysis, plus a statement of work to be done.
2. Scope and Drivers
Your consultant will need to know how your situation has changed since your original DR plan was established. Are there new environmental concerns and therefore new risks? Are there new threats that affect new stakeholder interests? Have certain people involved with your original DR plan left the organization?
3. Current State
Next, the consultant creates a detailed assessment of your existing DR plan and its capabilities, following a checklist of elements involving strategy, implementation and maintenance. Strategy examines key components such as your complete system list, tiered services and recovery strategy. Implementation apprises recovery services, communications and technology. Maintenance assesses DR aspects such as regular failover and fallback tests.
4. Future State
A proper DR assessment will then take a second pass through the checklist of DR elements, this time anticipating the long-term, desired vision of your organization’s DR program. Are you maintaining your DR plan as well as you should? Is DR sufficiently embedded enough in important IT practices? Is there enough automation in your recovery processes to speed up to your targeted recovery time?
5. Gaps
By measuring the current state of your DR plan against the future goals for the plan, you can establish the DR gaps that need to be filled. At this stage, your specialist or consultant will detail the necessary improvements and your organization can see which developments are the most important.
6. Initiatives
Deciding on the priority of DR initiatives should come from a strictly business case perspective. What resources are needed for each initiative? How much time does each one take? Do they need to be done in a certain sequence? What are their costs and benefits? Answering these questions will lead your organization to a firm DR improvement plan.
7. Roadmap
Your organization can then commit resources to your new DR initiatives, and communicate the plan to all stakeholders. Realistically, organizations do not commit all resources at once. The roadmap of a long-term DR improvement plan may include launching initiatives over the span of a few years. DR is a hugely important initiative for any business, but luckily, it is not triggered very frequently.
Understanding your organization needs a DR plan is the precursor to assessing and creating one that works and grows with your organization. Though updating your DR plan may be a long-term commitment, the added security in the event of an emergency makes the refresh worthwhile.