Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan
Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.
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Ineffective disaster recovery planning leads to:
- Limited or stalled progress – there is no effective approach to make this a manageable project that can actually be completed.
- No clear sense of appropriate recovery objectives or how to get there.
- An inability to meet regulatory requirements or customer demands for a functional DRP.
This blueprint enables you to:
- Define an appropriate (desired) recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis.
- Create a DR project roadmap to close the gap between current and desired recovery timelines.
- Document a step-by-step incident response plan to minimize business disruption.
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Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
Book NowCase Studies and Deliverables
Right-Sizing DRP Case Study of a State Government Agency
Increasing complexity within the environment, with competing priorities within the organization, made it challenging to create an actionable DRP or even to know where to start.
DRP Workshop Summary for a Mid-Sized Insurance Company
The existing Business Continuity Plan lacked the specific details of a step-by-step incident response plan, and failed to account for all potential disaster scenarios. IT needed direction and focus to work through those details and create a workable disaster recovery plan.
DRP Case Study of a Global Chemical Manufacturing Firm
The Americas IT department of a global chemical manufacturing firm had made significant strides in building redundancy and resiliency within the environment. However, little had been done to define, assess, and prioritize recovery objectives or document recovery plans.
DRP Case Study of a Large Tourism Complex
A large American tourism complex had some system backup capabilities, but no disaster recovery plan (DRP). The data center was housed in a 90-year-old wooden building with a tar and gravel roof prone to leaks. Failure to develop disaster prevention and recovery plans will leave the organization in a precarious position should any incident affect the data center.
DRP Case Study of a Mid-Sized Credit Union
A highly virtualized credit union located in the eastern US has made great strides in building redundancy in the main data center. However, apart from two major applications, the company was unprepared for a major disaster – lending and user connectivity systems would be down for 5-7 days, with full functionality hampered for weeks. An assessment of risk and downtime costs needed to be completed to ensure that appropriate plan and process in place to address the risk of unplanned downtime.
Module 1: Define Parameters for Your DRP
The Purpose
Identify key applications and dependencies based on business needs.
Key Benefits Achieved
Understand the entire IT “footprint” that needs to be recovered for key applications.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Assess current DR maturity. |
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| 1.2 | Determine critical business operations. |
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| 1.3 | Identify key applications and dependencies. |
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Module 2: Determine the Desired Recovery Timeline
The Purpose
Quantify application criticality based on business impact.
Key Benefits Achieved
Appropriate recovery time and recovery point objectives defined (RTOs/RPOs).
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Define an objective scoring scale to indicate different levels of impact. |
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| 2.2 | Estimate the impact of downtime. |
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| 2.3 | Determine desired RTO/RPO targets for applications based on business impact. |
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Module 3: Determine the Current Recovery Timeline and DR Gaps
The Purpose
Determine your baseline DR capabilities (your current state).
Key Benefits Achieved
Gaps between current and desired DR capability are quantified.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Conduct a tabletop exercise to determine current recovery procedures. |
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| 3.2 | Identify gaps between current and desired capabilities. |
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| 3.3 | Estimate likelihood and impact of failure of individual dependencies. |
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Module 4: Create a Project Roadmap to Close DR Gaps
The Purpose
Identify and prioritize projects to close DR gaps.
Key Benefits Achieved
DRP project roadmap defined that will reduce downtime and data loss to acceptable levels.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Determine what projects are required to close the gap between current and desired DR capability. |
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| 4.2 | Prioritize projects based on cost, effort, and impact on RTO/RPO reduction. |
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| 4.3 | Validate that the suggested projects will achieve the desired DR capability. |
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Module 5: Establish a Framework for Documenting Your DRP, and Summarize Next Steps
The Purpose
- Outline how to create concise, usable DRP documentation.
- Summarize workshop results.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A realistic and practical approach to documenting your DRP.
- Next steps documented.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | Outline a strategy for using flowcharts and checklists to create concise, usable documentation. |
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| 5.2 | Review Info-Tech’s DRP templates for creating system recovery procedures and a DRP summary document. |
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| 5.3 | Summarize the workshop results, including current potential downtime and action items to close gaps. |
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