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: Identify DRP maturity, key systems, and dependencies
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 DRP maturity through Info-Tech’s Maturity Scorecard. |
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| 1.2 | Identify the applications that support critical business activities. |
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| 1.3 | Select 2 or 3 key applications to be the focus of the workshop. |
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| 1.4 | Identify dependencies for selected applications. |
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| 1.5 | Identify current DR challenges for selected applications. |
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Module 2: Conduct a BIA to determine acceptable RTOs and RPOs
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 an IT outage on cost, goodwill, compliance, health & safety. |
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| 2.3 | Define acceptable RTOs/RPOs for selected applications based on business impact. |
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Module 3: Determine the current recovery workflow and projects to close gaps
The Purpose
- Determine your baseline DR capabilities (your current state).
- Identify and prioritize projects to close DR gaps.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Gaps between current and desired DR capability are quantified and prioritized.
- DRP project roadmap defined that will reduce downtime and data loss to acceptable levels.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Review tabletop planning – what is it, how is it done? |
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| 3.2 | Walk through a DR scenario to determine your current recovery timeline, RTO/RPO gaps, and risks to your ability to recover. |
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| 3.3 | Identify and prioritize projects to close RTO/RPO gaps and mitigate DR risks (e.g. unreliable backups). |
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Module 5: Identify remaining DRP documentation and 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 | Review the current-state incident response plan created from the tabletop planning exercise. |
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| 5.2 | Use tabletop planning to clarify the desired state and validate that the suggested projects will close your DR gaps. |
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| 5.3 | Outline a strategy for using flowcharts, checklists, and a summary document to complete your DRP. |
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| 5.4 | Workshop review and wrap-up. |
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