Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Business Continuity Planning

Sarbanes - Oxley, ISO 27000 (27001 & 27002)
PCI, & HIPAA Compliant

This Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Template can be used for any size of enterprise. The Disaster Recovery Planning template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant.  The DRP Template comes as a Word document and includes:

• Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Template
• Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
• Work Plan
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program
• Pandemic Planning Check List
• Media Communication plan with a definition of best practices

Features include

• Compliance with the new ISO 27000 (27001, 27002 and 27031), Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS and HIPAA standards
• Web Site Disaster Recovery Planning Form
• Department Disaster Recovery Activation Workbook
  • Quick Reference Guide
  • Team Alert List (Form)
  • Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity  Team Responsibilities
  • Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity  Team Checklist
  • Critical Functions Definition
  • Normal Business Hour Response Procedures
  • After Hours Response Procedures
  • Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Location(s) Definition
  • Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Recovery Procedures
  • Notification Procedures
  • Notification Call List (Form)
• Updated Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
• Vendor Disaster Recovery Questionnaire
• Vendor Phone List Form Updated
• Key Customer Notification Form
• Critical Resources to be Retrieved Form
• Business Continuity Off-Site Materials Form

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template comes in several versions

The DRP template is over 200 pages and includes everything needed to customize the Disaster Recovery Plan to fit your specific requirement.  The electronic document includes proven written text and examples for the following major sections of a disaster recovery plan:

• Plan Introduction
• Business Impact Analysis - including a sample impact matrix
• DRP Organization Responsibilities pre and post disaster - drp checklist
• Backup Strategy for Data Centers, Departmental File Servers, Wireless Network servers, Data at Outsourced Sites, Desktops (In office and "at home"), Laptops and PDA's.
• Recovery Strategy including approach, escalation plan process and decision points
• Disaster Recovery Procedures in a check list format
• Plan Administration Process
• Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points
• Job Descriptions (each 3 pages long) for:
  • Disaster Recovery Manager
  • Manager Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
  • Pandemic Coordinator
• Work Plan to modify and implement the template.  Included is a list of deliverables for each task. (Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Assessment)

There is a extensive section that show how a full test of the DRP can be conducted.  It includes

• Disaster Recovery Manager Responsibilities
• Distribution of the Disaster Recovery Plan
• Maintenance of the Business Impact Analysis
• Training of the Disaster Recovery Team
• Testing of the Disaster Recovery Plan
• Evaluation of the Disaster Recovery Plan Tests
• Maintenance of the Disaster Recovery Plan

Click on the link below to get the Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity sample pages now and make it a part of your disaster recovery toolkit.

This template is not for resale or re-distribution

 

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Disaster Planning - Business Continuity News

Learn more about Computer Liquidators.

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Can you use the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

February 2nd, 2012

In December 2010 Google launched Message Continuity, a new cloud-based disaster recovery and  business continuity service for Microsoft Exchange. A year later, Google has announced the end of that service, leaving many organizations with the task of finding an alternative Microsoft Exchange business continuity service.

While the vendor said that existing contracts will continue to be serviced until their renewal date, for some early adopters of this service will only have a few weeks, or even days, to find an alternative solution.

This raises a warning flag about the wisdom of relying on the public cloud companies for any services which may be critical to your day-to-day activities; or for business continuity.

The cloud brings many new solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity: but buyer beware has never been more crucial. Service level agreements only apply if your supplier is in business; and there is certainly no requirement for suppliers to provide any support or service once a contract expires.

After this termination of service can you trust Google or any other vendor to host a mission-critical service?

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Core disaster recovery planning questions

January 20th, 2012

Whether your business is a one-man operation or it employs a thousand people, the starting point is the same: identify the processes critical to your success. To do this, you should first define what critical means in your business. Rank each process according to that definition, and then ask how long can your business survive without it, who performs it, and what IT resources support it.

Questions you can ask:

• Can you simply not survive without this process? This should be your primary priority. Your business continuity plan must protect all primary priorities when a disaster strikes.
• Can you survive only a day or two without it? This should be a secondary priority. Your business continuity plan should address all secondary priorities after primary priorities are handled.
• Can you survive a week or more without it? Add it to your list of low priorities.

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Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption

January 7th, 2012

BS 25999 defines the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) as :the duration after which an organization's viability will be irreparably damaged if delivery of a particular product or service cannot be resumed". It advises companies to "…assess over time the impacts… if the activity is disrupted" and "…establish the MTPD of each activity". It instructs us to identify the latest time by which an activity must be resumed, establish the minimum level to which resumption must be achieved, and set the time within which normal activity levels must be restored. It says companies should "…identify any inter-dependent activities, assets, supporting infrastructure or resources that also have to be maintained"

 

Defining Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption...

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Disaster Preparedness equals risk, resilience and effective disaster recovery planning

December 14th, 2011

Most people who are involved in emergency management are aware of the four primary phases of emergency management: prevention/mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

Recovery includes short-term measures taken to restore essential functions and systems, as well as longer-term activities intended to facilitate a return to pre-emergency conditions, or ideally to improve conditions through mitigation measures.

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Importance of data recovery for mid-sized companies

November 5th, 2011

Identifying the right tools for data recovery in the disaster recovery and business continuity processes is extremely important to the success and continuity of middle‐sized organizations. These tools need to be integrated without requiring an expensive and disruptive overhaul of existing IT infrastructure, and without adding to or demanding more of IT staff.

One key to this is to build on existing data storage and protection equipment. Tape is the best option when expanding on existing processes, because tape is a medium that is affordable.

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What is ISO 27031:2011

October 27th, 2011

ISO 27031:2011 – Information and communications technology (ICT) continuity management, developed originally by the British Standards Institution (BSI), was accepted as an ISO standard in 2011 and represents a management systems-based implementation of an IT disaster recovery program. It has six key principles:

• Protecting the ICT environment from incidents, failures and disruptions;
• Detecting incidents at the earliest possible time;
• Reacting to incidents as efficiently as possible;
• Recovering by identifying and implementing appropriate recovery strategies;
•  Operating in disaster recovery mode.
• Returning to normal operations.

While ISO 27031 is intended for use in the larger context of a business continuity program, organizations have successfully implemented this standard and then later grew into business continuity.

Structured as a management systems-based standard, ISO 27031 has two main components: the management system and the process. The management system is intended to ensure that an organization has a documented process to execute ICT continuity management. It utilizes the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle consistent with ISO and other management system based standards. The process details the necessary components to provide the recovery capability. While the management system described in ISO 27031 can be established solely for IT disaster recovery, there are elements of the process that assume the existence of an overall business continuity program. As you can see below, ICT requirements are established by business continuity requirements typically determined during a business impact analysis.

The process of developing, maintaining, and improving an ICT capability are defined as five high level components:

• Understanding the ICT requirements for business continuity – with the purpose of determining the ICT continuity services needed to support the business continuity requirements. The process requires understanding the components of critical services in production, their current continuity capability and the gap between current capabilities and business continuity requirements. The analysis should also focus on actions that can be taken to improve the resiliency of the production environment;
• Determining ICT continuity strategies – with the purpose of developing both an overall ICT continuity management strategy and strategies for each critical ICT service that closes gaps identified during the previous phase;
• Developing and implementing ICT strategies – with the purpose of implementing the chosen strategies, including establishing the necessary organizational structure, plans and procedures;
• Exercising and testing – with the purpose of ensuring that the strategies and plans work as intended;
• Maintenance, review and improvement – with the purpose of ensuring that ICT continuity strategy remains current and appropriate.

For those familiar with BS 25999-2:2007, the business continuity management standard, the structure above is consistent with sections four through six of that standard.

Given the similarities to BS 25999, ISO 27031 is the logical choice for implementing a disaster recovery capability in organizations that either utilize BS 25999 for business continuity or have other management systems-based programs. It also provides solid guidance for organizations that have no business continuity or other structure in place to serve as a basis for disaster recovery development. Establishing a management system as part of an ISO 27031 implementation will provide the necessary governance and provide a platform for the development of a more comprehensive business continuity program.

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Mirrored DR architecture

October 16th, 2011

The most common DR architecture for mission-critical, multi-tier applications consists of a mirrored site with geographically distributed clusters of front-end application servers (the presentation tier), calling functions executed on another local cluster of business logic servers (logic tier), which access a local database (data tier). Users access the application via a global load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC) that seamlessly routes client requests - whether these are Web-based or client-server application protocols like CIFS and MAPI - to the "most available" system. The load balancers must themselves be geographically distributed and redundant to ensure no single points of failure should the entire data center go offline.

Data consistency is achieved by mirroring all back-end databases at the SAN level. Here, the IT architect has two choices: synchronous or asynchronous SAN replication. The former provides virtually instantaneous recovery, with perfect consistency, but with the glaring drawback of a severe distance limitation between mirrors to minimize latency, since transactions can't be committed on the primary database until they are written to disk and acknowledged by the secondary.

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