Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan
Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.
Unlock This BlueprintBlueprint Contents:
1. Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Research – A step-by-step document that helps streamline your DR planning process and build a plan that's concise, usable, and maintainable.
Any time a major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create an IT DRP. This blueprint will help you develop an actionable DRP by following our four-phase methodology to define scope, current status, and dependencies; conduct a business impact analysis; identify and address gaps in the recovery workflow; and complete, extend, and maintain your DRP.
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Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phases 1-4
2. DRP Case Studies – Examples to help you understand the governance and incident response components of a DRP and to show that your DRP project does not need to be as onerous as imagined.
These examples include a client who leveraged the DRP blueprint to create practical, concise, and easy-to-maintain DRP governance and incident response plans and a case study based on a hospital providing a wide range of healthcare services.
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Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP -
Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP – Healthcare Example
3. DRP Maturity Scorecard – An assessment tool to evaluate the current state of your DRP.
Use this tool to measure your current DRP maturity and identify gaps to address. It includes a comprehensive list of requirements for your DRP program, including core and industry requirements.
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DRP Maturity Scorecard
4. DRP Project Charter Template – A template to communicate important details on the project purpose, scope, and parameters.
The project charter template includes details on the project overview (description, background, drivers, and objectives); governance and management (project stakeholders/roles, budget, and dependencies); and risks, assumptions, and constraints (known and potential risks and mitigation strategy).
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DRP Project Charter Template
5. DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – An evaluation tool to estimate the impact of downtime to determine appropriate, acceptable recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) and to review gaps between objectives and actuals.
This tool enables you to identify critical applications/systems; identify dependencies; define objective scoring criteria to evaluate the impact of application/system downtime; determine the impact of downtime and establish criticality tiers; set recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) based on the impact of downtime; record recovery actuals (RTA/RPA) and identify any gaps between objectives and actuals; and identify dependencies that regularly fail (and have a significant impact when they fail) to prioritize efforts to improve resiliency.
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DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (.xlsx)
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DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (.xlsx)
6. DRP BIA Scoring Context Example – A tool to record assumptions you made in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool to explain the results and drive business engagement and feedback.
Use this tool to specifically record assumptions made about who and what are impacted by system downtime and record assumptions made about impact severity.
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DRP BIA Scoring Context Example
7. DRP Recovery Workflow Template – A flowchart template to provide an at-a-glance view of the recovery workflow.
This simple format is ideal during crisis situations, easier to maintain, and often quicker to create. Use this template to document the Notify - Assess - Declare disaster workflow, document current and planned future state recovery workflows, including gaps and risks, and review an example recovery workflow.
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DRP Recovery Workflow Template (.pdf) -
DRP Recovery Workflow Template (.vsd)
8. DRP Roadmap Tool – A visual roadmapping tool that will help you plan, communicate, and track progress for your DRP initiatives.
Improving DR capabilities is a marathon, not a sprint. You likely can't fund and resource all the measures for risk mitigation at once. Instead, use this tool to create a roadmap for actions, tasks, projects, and initiatives to complete in the short, medium, and long term. Prioritize high-benefit, low-cost mitigations.
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DRP Roadmap Tool
9. DRP Recap and Results Template – A template to summarize and present key findings from your DR planning exercises and documents.
Use this template to present your results from the DRP Maturity Scorecard, BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment, DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool, tabletop planning exercises, DRP Recovery Workflow Template, and DRP Roadmap Tool.
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DRP Recap and Results Template
10. DRP Workbook – A comprehensive tool that enables you to organize information to support DR planning.
Leverage this tool to document information regarding DRP resources (list the documents/information sources that support DR planning and where they are located) and DR teams and contacts (list the DR teams, SMEs critical to DR, and key contacts, including business continuity management team leads that would be involved in declaring a disaster and coordinating response at an organizational level).
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DRP Workbook
11. Appendix
The following tools and templates are also included as part of this blueprint to use as needed to supplement the core steps above:
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DRP Incident Response Management Tool
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DRP Vendor Evaluation Questionnaire
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DRP Vendor Evaluation Tool
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Severity Definitions and Escalation Rules Template
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BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment
Your Challenge
- Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
- Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but will not be effective in a crisis.
- The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
- The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- At its core, disaster recovery (DR) is about ensuring service continuity. Create a plan that can be leveraged for both isolated and catastrophic events.
- Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens. Focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
- Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all services require fast failover.
Impact and Result
- Define appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
- Document an incident response plan that captures all of the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
- Create a DR roadmap to close gaps between current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
9.6/10
Overall Impact
$83,619
Average $ Saved
31
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Woodbine Entertainment Group
Workshop
8/10
$10,000
20
Very difficult to meet ITRG's back-to-back scheduling requirement for these sessions. Excellent discussions facilitated by Venkat across lines o... Read More
State of Kentucky - Kentucky Transportation Cabinet
Workshop
10/10
$64,999
50
Venkat was a great facilitator and had clearly planned the days well and did preliminary work each night so we would have a very valuable day of wo... Read More
Small Enterprise Finance Agency
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,999
20
Templates and advise was very useful
MyPath, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$129K
120
Frank brings excellent experience to the table in relation to our DR and BC Workshops and discussions. We are fortunate to have him facilitating fo... Read More
Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority
Guided Implementation
8/10
$5,000
5
Very knowledgeable help and good insights...
Georgia Department of Banking and Finance
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,999
20
Kansas Public Employees Retirement System
Guided Implementation
10/10
$32,499
20
Best part is being able to ask questions on any parts that I don't understand. No worst part.
County of Montgomery
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
20
Andrew is an awesome analyst and advisor. He was able to keep us on track and explain everything in detail as we worked through the program. It was... Read More
Sirtex Medical US Holdings, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$129K
20
The value provided by Infotech is threefold. Firstly, there's the research; clear, comprehensive and ready to share, making me look like a rock sta... Read More
Santa Fe Community College
Guided Implementation
9/10
$1,039
23
St. Petersburg College
Guided Implementation
10/10
$123K
47
Frank was amazing to work with, collaborate on ideas and create a framework for success.
The National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited
Workshop
10/10
N/A
16
Excellent support and assistance by Dave throughout the workshop. Very experienced in the field and was quite knowledgeable when answering our ques... Read More
General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
Workshop
10/10
$64,999
60
The presenter (Joe) did an outstanding job and I would recommend him to anyone for his commitment, follow thru, and presentation. The tabletop exer... Read More
City of Walla Walla
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,999
32
Frank knows his stuff, great to work with. Nothing bad, as this is a critical component of our business and a gap.
General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
Guided Implementation
9/10
N/A
50
The information presented was clear and the Info-Tech team has moved quickly to help us get this workshop lined up. We appreciate the attention to ... Read More
Collège communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick
Workshop
10/10
N/A
50
Great session with a knowledgeable facilitator! Andrew sharp helped us identify point of improvement and how to properly document a DR Plan. I will... Read More
MyPath, Inc.
Workshop
10/10
$64,999
50
Airgain
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,999
20
Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$129K
50
The best part has been working with Darin Stahl - he is a wealth of information. The worst part is working with disparate spreadsheets - this is a... Read More
University of the Fraser Valley
Guided Implementation
9/10
$20,500
10
The Star Entertainment Group
Guided Implementation
8/10
N/A
N/A
Frank Trovato's review of our existing DR documentation has been invaluable. Frank advised that as an organisation we have a good level of maturity... Read More
Cross Country Mortgage, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$30,549
8
Opal Packaging
Guided Implementation
10/10
$20,500
10
Our ability to access subject matter expertise throughout the process was fantastic. Frank provided practical advice and kept us on track to work ... Read More
Sirtex Medical US Holdings, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$259K
50
The ability of InfoTech to help me distill my thoughts into cohesive actions, recommendations and present those in a refined, professional way is i... Read More
Rosemont Pharmaceuticals Ltd
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
5
Noble Research Institute, LLC
Guided Implementation
8/10
$12,999
5
Frank was very knowledgeable and easy to work with.
Year Up
Workshop
10/10
$129K
5
Best part! Sumit's ability to pull out additional and key information from our SME's and to provide the content needed for the foundations of our D... Read More
Carmeuse Research & Technology SA
Guided Implementation
8/10
$12,999
32
Vancouver Police Department
Workshop
10/10
$80,000
60
Shared Support South, Inc
Workshop
10/10
$2,599
5
Facilitator adjusted to our needs and situation. Very helpful and did an excellent job of facilitating remotely during a four-day session.