DRP: Set the Right Scope for Success

About this research note: Strategy & Planning notes define DRP: Set the Right the critical decisions and actions surrounding successful adoption Scope for Success of a specific technology, tool, Publish Date: April 13, 2007 or process.
IT departments hope they never need to test their work beyond scheduled scenario tests of the plan. As such, every Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) must be based upon a solid planning of the enterprise's staff and a realistic assessment of priorities.


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Executive Summary Before any significant amount of work can be done developing a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), it is essential to know exactly what the scope of the plan will be and who will be involved its development. To assist IT departments with DR planning, this research note covers the following topics: » Identifying and building a Disaster Recovery Planning team. » Defining affected areas.
» Establishing a preliminary timeline. » Creating a preliminary report. » Using the Excel-based "Disaster Recovery Planning Workbook."
IT departments hope they never need to test their work beyond scheduled scenario tests of the plan. As such, every DRP must be based upon a solid planning of the enterprise's staff and a realistic assessment of priorities.
Strategy & Planning 2 DRP: Set the Right Scope for Succes
Planning Point Before any significant amount of work can be done developing a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), it is essential to know exactly what the scope of the plan will be and who will be involved in its development. IT departments must plan and make provisions for various aspects of the DRP, including:
» Achieving consensus for DRP objectives. » Identifying, building, and managing a DRP team. » Defining areas affected by the DRP process.
» Establishing a preliminary timeline for project completion. » Creating a preliminary DRP report for stakeholders. This research note is written under the assumption that the business case for DRP has already been established, and that the IT department has a DRP budget approved (or is in the process of approval). The goal here is to commence the DRP planning process, achieve further buy-in, and to document the various stakeholders, assets, and business units that will be affected by DR planning activities.
Key Considerations 1. Defining clear standards, tools, and templates. DRP must be standardized across all satellite offices, remote departments, and dispersed business units. Standardized templates and tools will be necessary for consolidating reports, assessments, and reviews of disparate processes or procedures. This will help close the culture gap between disparate locations. 2. Achieving consensus on disaster recovery assumptions. For DRPs that involve multiple sites or offices, it is important to gather affiliated IT members together in order to reach common ground on resource allocations, DRP objectives, and priorities. Each site may have different DR criteria or risks, so consensus-building will help generate goodwill and collaboration. Most important is agreement upon the actual definition of "critical." For example, assume the entire network goes down, the day of payroll entry. Does IT bring the all-critical SAP application up, or should payroll be up and running first to avoid having hundreds or thousands of employees miss their mortgage payments? Be sure to discuss the following points:
» General assumptions (i.e. what constitutes a worst-case scenario). » Disaster scope assumptions (what will be passed off to the Business Continuity Planning team). » Recovery time objective assumptions.
Strategy & Planning 3 DRP: Set the Right Scope for Succes
» Recovery operations assumptions.
» DRP administration and training assumptions. 3. Retrieval of existing documentation. Collect existing procedural documents, recovery schedules, processes, standards, and policies (e.g. Visio flowcharts of certain procedures). Bear in mind that third-party services or collocation situations are not part of the DRP: only covered technologies are those controlled and owned by IT, except where communication points to those third parties need to be restored in order to resume the outsourced service. IT must also discover all of those Excel spreadsheets and Access ... [download for more]