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
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.
9.5/10
Overall Impact
$47,980
Average $ Saved
29
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
The Corporation of the City of Windsor
Workshop
9/10
$10,000
10
going through an example to illustrate the workflow. would have liked to dig deeper into the framework
City of Lynnwood
Workshop
10/10
$6,850
32
City of Fairfax
Workshop
8/10
N/A
10
Clayton County School District
Guided Implementation
10/10
$34,250
10
Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe
Guided Implementation
10/10
$2,740
110
The templates and guidelines are very helpful in working on the DRP. Tried to do it using google in the past and not much progress. Darin has hel... Read More
Seplat Energy Plc
Guided Implementation
10/10
$123K
60
The best part is getting good advice on how best to proceed. Worse part was not meeting as often as we should have due to scheduling conflicts at m... Read More
Niobec Inc
Guided Implementation
10/10
$5,000
5
City Of Fredericksburg
Workshop
9/10
$68,500
32
One of the best parts was getting our stakeholders involved in the process. Sumit's technical expertise and experience working through DR plannin... Read More
University of the Fraser Valley
Guided Implementation
7/10
$1,900
5
Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$137K
90
Darin was excellent - a true professional and voice of reason and reality. He helped my team stay on track and deliver a solid DR capability for o... Read More
Stream Realty Partners, L.P.
Guided Implementation
8/10
$34,250
5
Evommune, Inc.
Guided Implementation
9/10
$6,850
18
Texas Trust Credit Union
Guided Implementation
10/10
$32,195
20
I really appreciate Scott’s experience and expertise on this subject. He made it clear and easy to understand.
City of Palm Beach Gardens
Workshop
10/10
$34,250
20
Time consuming for a large portion of staff however will pay off with saving time for all employees in the event of a disaster.
National Arts Centre Canada
Guided Implementation
10/10
$50,000
20
Working with Frank was wonderful, he was knowledgeable, patient and really took his time to walk us through the fundamentals without judgement. It ... Read More
State of New Mexico Early Childhood & Care Department
Guided Implementation
9/10
$13,700
20
Organization of materials that can be tailored to organization size and maturity and can be approached iteratively. Great callouts differentiating... Read More
County of Stafford
Workshop
10/10
$137K
90
Our workshop facilitator, Venkat, was extremely knowledgeable! He added significant value to our discussions and provided us with great recommendat... Read More
Eastern Michigan University
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
N/A
Our consultant was wonderful. He was very knowledgeable.
Stream Realty Partners, L.P.
Guided Implementation
9/10
$34,250
10
Lower Hudson Regional Information Center
Workshop
10/10
N/A
20
Venkat proved to be an exceptional consultant for our team. He came well-prepared and rapidly grasped the subtleties of our organization, adapting ... Read More
Solano County, CA
Workshop
10/10
$68,500
20
The workshop was fantastic. It empowered us to establish a robust BIA process that our organization was lacking. I now have the tools to develop a ... Read More
Department of Agriculture Kentucky
Guided Implementation
8/10
N/A
2
The risk assessment techniques were useful in gauging the impact of various scenarios, and the official engagement provided persuasion for other te... Read More
Conseil Scolaire Catholique MonAvenir
Guided Implementation
9/10
$25,000
38
The experience was excellent overall. Darin was very knowledgable and really did a great job of guiding us through the process. We really enjoyed t... Read More
Engie North America INC
Workshop
10/10
$137K
20
Joe Riley was an excellent resource with vast experience and expertise to guide Engie thru the process of identifying Gaps and documenting existing... Read More
Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs
Guided Implementation
9/10
N/A
100
It was great working with Scott Houle. He is knowledgeable and patient and made sure that I had all the information necessary to tackle something a... Read More
Firstmac Limited
Guided Implementation
10/10
$1,820
2
Support in classification and risk ranking of our BCP Risks.
Monroe #1 BOCES
Workshop
7/10
N/A
N/A
Facilitator was outstanding and flexible to our needs. As our work was focused on developing a roadmap for a DRP replacement, estimating time and ... Read More
Carver County, MN
Guided Implementation
9/10
$13,700
7
Socan
Workshop
10/10
$100K
10
We found the domain knowledge of the facilitator to be very good which helped us to ask and answer the right questions based on our environment and... Read More
Coachella Valley Water District
Workshop
10/10
$68,500
20
There are no issues or concerns to report. Sumit has proven to be an exceptional consultant, demonstrating a deep familiarity with the specific typ... Read More