Senior Management and Your Disaster Recovery Plan
A Backup Article Contributed by A.J. Vasaris
Senior Management and Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Any business can experience an incident that may prevent it from continuing to operate normally, ranging from a major IT malfunction to a fire. Management recognition is the most important step in creating a successful disaster recovery plan. To obtain the necessary human resources and time required from your organization, senior management has to understand and support the business impacts and risks. Several key tasks are required to achieve management approval.
Identify Possible Disaster Recovery Plan Scenarios
Identify the top ten disasters and analyze their impact on your business. Your analysis should cover effects on communications with suppliers and customers, the impact on operations, and disruption on key business processes. You should complete this work in advance of the disaster recovery planning process.
Here are some possible disasters: fire, storm, water, earthquake, chemical accidents, nuclear accidents, war, terrorist attacks and other crime, cold winter weather, extreme heat, loss of key staff, and hurricane. The possibility of each scenario depends on factors such as where you are located and geo-political stability. Most disasters are caused by fire so you may as well start with fire as your first case study scenario.
Assess the impact of a disaster on your business from both a financial and physical infrastructure perspective by asking the following questions:
How much of the organization's resources could be lost in each scenario?
What are the associated costs and how will they be funded?
What tasks and resources are required to rebuild?
How long will it take to recover?
What is the impact on the overall organization?
How are customers affected and what is the impact on them?
How are vendors and suppliers impacted?
Build Management Support of Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Senior management needs to be involved in the disaster recovery planning process, and should be aware of the risks and potential impact on the organization. The first study on disaster recovery should include an estimate of possible costs and time to implement a disaster recovery strategy. Once management understands the financial, physical, and business costs associated with a disaster, it is then able to build a strategy and ensure that this strategy is implemented across the organization.
Obtain Funding of Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Senior management has to agree on the disaster recovery planning project, as well as provide financial and human resources for the project. The first step is the announcement of the disaster recovery project and kickoff of a planning group or steering committee, which should be led by a senior management person.
Every department, especially IT, should be represented and participate in the creation of the disaster recovery plan. After all scenarios are identified and documented, testing must be performed. A plan without testing is not much better than no plan at all.
The key to disaster recovery is the disaster recovery plan. If a plan lets everyone sleep better at night, it's also good for management and boardrooms that need to hear that operations has a way to recover and will continue after a disaster.
