Disaster Recovery Plan Template - Avoid This Mistake When Using a Disaster Recovery Plan Template

What is the mistake? Focusing your disaster recovery plan template on technology first and business process priorities second.

This might sound like a strange statement coming from network infrastructure experts. But focusing on appliances and software solutions can lead to the development of incomplete or inadequate solutions and this can be an expensive and humbling mistake! IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is not about appliances, power supplies, routers, switches and servers, it's about supporting business processes.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) are two separate and related concepts that are often lumped together when developing recovery plans. Let's start with some quick definitions.

IT Business Continuity

Business Continuity refers to an organization's ability to keep vital business operations running at or near normal capacities in the event of infrastructure failure. These failures can be caused by human errors, power failures, application errors and a host of others that impact the ability of the infrastructure to properly support the organization. When speaking of Business Continuity the majority of the infrastructure remains in place and functional which is in contrast to Disaster Recovery.

IT Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery refers to incidents that significantly impact or make unavailable critical infrastructure. The most common examples are natural disasters and other "acts of God." Planning for data protection and recovery are fundamental to disaster recovery principles.

So the idea of BCDR really is to ensure that your company or organization continues to function at or near normal capacity levels under even the most challenging conditions.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Well, wrapped up in that deceptively simple concept are dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of business processes, most, if not all of which are dependent upon your IT infrastructure for successful execution.

So the place to begin defining your disaster recovery plan is not in the server room but rather out among the business units.

For example, maybe you work for a financial institution that has to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or PATRIOT Act regulations. Information availability is required under all conditions, including routine back-up. Fines for non-compliance and damage to reputation for failure to comply are huge.

Or

Your organization manufactures precision electronic components and your ERP and inventory management systems must be operational during the week. Downtime costs you $3500/hour. However, routine maintenance can be performed during the week.

Or

Your company processes a high volume of data entry, fulfillment processing and shipping operations around the clock. Downtime has been calculated to be $12,700 per hour.

3 different scenarios with 3 entirely different sets of requirements.

Hopefully you see that before you can develop or use a recovery plan template for your organization you must identify, understand, and prioritize the requirements of each of the most critical processes.

To learn more about developing or using disaster recovery plan templates more effectively I highly recommend you read the white paper titled The Disaster Waiting to Happen: The 4 Biggest BCDR Mistakes People Make And Why They Cost So Much. You can get your copy while supplies last here Disaster Recovery Plan Template and you'll discover why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning remains such a hot topic in the IT infrastructure world today.