Services

The Assessment: Improving the Current DR Plan

This service will help you determine where you are today and where you’d like to go. If you are “here” now, but want to be “there” tomorrow, we can help layout the roadmap to get there, even if it requires a few years. For us, it’s not about throwing everything out and starting over again, and it’s not about measuring up to the biggest companies with the deepest pockets. It’s about creating a strategy that works for you, your business, your risks, and where you sit today. Complete, transparent and quick are the qualities of a good assessment.

We will help you with unbiased and cost-justified advice for getting you to the next step. Your priorities get sorted out based on the greatest weaknesses, and most significant opportunities for your business. We address aspects of your program that are outdated, and change only what needs to keep pace with your business environment. We also consider any new or emerging IT technologies that will reduce costs and risks. The objective is feeling comfortable with the right level of “insurance”.  It must be affordable too!
Improving an existing disaster recovery plan involves using timesaving tools such as a checklist and maturity model to assess status against the standard 3-Phase DR Life Cycle.  It will help uncover gaps in:

  1. Documentation and plans
  2. Recovery facilities & infrastructure
  3. Testing & recovery teams
  4. Maintenance & support processes

An assessment provides the organization with a “diagnostic” of how well it is doing. The details will include identifying the following:

  1. How to update the strategy, taking into account any new threats, exposures, or weaknesses (a separate, thorough Risk Assessment may be required);
  2. Where any remediation or improvements are required;
  3. Priorities, with staffing, funding and dependencies;
  4. Approaches to sequencing initiatives over realistic timeframes – resulting in an easy-to-follow implementation strategy or “roadmap”.

Disaster Recovery Process

Create Strategy

Implement

Maintain

Return to the Create Strategy Step

Is your current Disaster Recovery Plan effective, up-to-date, and ready to go should the need arise?

Score your Disaster Recovery Plan using:

These tools will help determine how effective your current program’s strategy, implementation, and maintenance are. Benchmark where you are and where you want to go.

Plan Development:
Building a Disaster Recovery Plan from Scratch

No disaster recovery plan? Or perhaps you do have one, but it’s outdated and not salvageable. If so, then we offer the services to get you one faster. Here we will re-pose all the key questions in the 3-Phase DR Life Cycle.

From a strategy perspective, we help identify the most important system assets that need protection. We then identify the relevant risks and exposures to the underlying IT infrastructure. This sometimes involves conducting a separate Information Risk Assessment to confirm where you may need to comply or adopt voluntarily standards for risk reduction. Based on quantifying potential business losses, we define the ROI or business case for investing in recovery measures. Once determining the appropriate recovery strategy for your systems portfolio, we help you chose the most cost-effective alternative, in-house or contracted services, to form the basis of your DR plan.

During implementation, we help determine and negotiate any services arrangements or assist with procurement of essential communications and technology. By providing useable templates, the turnaround time for re-launching your DR program and plan is increased. If supplemental “as built” documentation is required, we help define and complete that as well, inexpensively, and to appropriately recognized standards as required.

Once the plan is written and the recovery infrastructure has been installed, we help organize, script and oversee the testing process with your recovery team to ensure everything works together.

Finally, we help you “embed” key elements of your DR program into your normal business and IT practices.  This will ensure that the program is seamlessly sustainable for the foreseeable future. It will be cost-effective to update, test, audit and be “evergreen”, until it is ultimately needed. We ensure maximum integration and overlap with any other existing crisis management arrangements you may have including emergency or business continuity programs.