Deciding which systems get the priority treatment after a disaster can be difficult. After all, how do you decide whether accounting has everything they need first or your call center gets the applications running first? In most disaster situations, users have one view on what the priorities should be while the IT department has an entirely different perspective. Appropriate rankings may be difficult to get, but they’re a must if you’re going to be up and running as soon as possible.
From the User Perspective
In most cases, having both users and the IT department sit down with a disaster recovery planning specialist is the best way to create priority tiers. Users need to be explicit about the amount of downtime they can tolerate (i.e. in minutes, hours or days). They also need to be quite clear on the maximum data loss they can sustain.
From the IT Perspective
IT personnel need to look at things from an entirely different angle. They should express their concerns in terms of technical feasibility. They need to be clear about how long it would take to get certain types of processors, storage or other components failed-over and through the successful restoration process to make an application or “integrated” system available to certain users. Like or closely-linked items should be assigned the same tier.
Consolidating the Information
Both parties have to be part of the priority tier setting process. This simply isn’t an isolated exercise. Users and the IT department have to look carefully at the list of systems and apps so the business as a whole can agree on the ones that need to be recovered in priority order and within what timeframe that might be possible.
Building the Investment
This process could be the basis of the investment decisions made around disaster recovery planning. The tier definitions should be rooted in the expected hardship and losses expected from an outage and directly-related to the proposed level of investment, in terms of both soft and hard costs. By having a clear understanding of how to prioritize the tiers within your organization, you are defining how you value the contribution of these systems to your business.
