This Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) can be
used as a template for any enterprise. The template and supporting material
have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The Disaster
Planning Template comes as a Word document and includes:
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Disaster Recovery Plan
Template
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Business and IT Impact
Analysis Questionnaire
-
Work Plan
-
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Audit Program
New with version (version
history) are (Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO
27000 Compliant):
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Web Site Disaster Recovery Planning Form
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Department Disaster Recovery Activation Workbook
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Quick Reference Guide
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Team Alert List (Form)
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DRP Team Responsibilities
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DRP Team Checklist
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Critical Function(s) Definition
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Normal Business Hour Response Procedures
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After Hours Response Procedures
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DRP Location(s) Definition
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DRP Recovery Procedures
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Notification Procedures
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Notification Call List (Form)
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Vendor Disaster Recovery Questionnaire
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Vendor Phone List Form Updated
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Key Customer Notification Form
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Critical Resources to be Retrieved Form
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Business Continuity Off-Site Materials Form
Included in the template is Business Impact Questionnaire
as well as a full Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager.
The premium edition contains 11 full job descriptions.
Clients can also subscribe to Janco's DRP update service and
receive all updates to the DRP Template for 18 months* from the date
of purchase.
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:
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Plan
Introduction
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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
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Disaster
Recovery Procedures
in a check list format
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Plan
Administration
Process
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Technical
Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and
contact points
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Job Description
for Disaster Recovery Manager (3 pages long) - entire disaster
recovery team job descriptions are available.
-
Work Plan
to modify and implement the template. Included is a
list of deliverables for each task.
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
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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
Testimonial -
Dave Baker - City of Hamilton -
I have found
the DRP template invaluable!
Testimonial -
Bob Rifenbury -MCSE/CCNA Lauch
Testing Lab -
The DRP Template saved me about 6 months of work!
Testimonial - Kelly Keeler -
Martin's Point Health Care -
I have received and I began using the template
immediately. IT IS GREAT! Made this process a snap for me. Cut my
documentation time down from.
weeks to hours! This document has made,
what began to be an overwhelming process turn into a snap!
Testimonial -
Juan Stamos - Mexico City
Corporation -
We had a DRP in place, but
needed a more user friendly structure. The Disaster Recovery Template (Gold
edition) has that structure. It was very easy to quickly move our DRP into
Janco's DRP Template -- a real added value.
* Update service is for 12 months unless it is purchased within 30
days of the purchase of the Template. Janco reserves the right
to validate purchase of the customer was made for the template.
This template is
not for resale or re-distribution -
Disaster Recovery Planning Template
Disaster Recovery
Template, Disaster Recovery
Site Map
Minimun and Standard Power Protection for Workstations for DRP and BCP
Personal computers and remote servers often are damaged by
subtle anomalies that users never see, such as sags, surges, spikes, brownouts,
line noise, frequency variation, switching transients and harmonic distortion. A
business on typical utility power is subjected to these hidden power problems
every day and complete outages several times a year. Solutions that you should
implement for all such equipment include:
-
Minimum -
Surge suppressors address the power surges, but have no effect on the
under-voltage and variance conditions that can erode equipment health over
time or zap it in an instant.
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Standard -
Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPSs) protect your IT systems by conditioning
incoming power to smooth out the sags and spikes that are all too common on
the grid and other primary sources of power Providing ride-through power to
cover for sags or short-term outages (30 – 60 minutes,
typically).
...
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Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity
Disaster
planning, emergency
preparedness, or business
continuity (and experts note that there are differences) - the goals are ultimately the same: to get an organization back up and
running in the event of an interruption.
The problem causing the interruption could be one computer crashing or an
entire network crashing. Or it
could be an electrical outage or the result of a terrorist activity. The goal is to have some contingency
plans in the event of a problem. A
disaster recovery plan exists to preserve the organization so that it can
continue to offer its services.
A
disaster recovery plan is a users' guide - the documentation - for how to
preserve an organization. In order
for a plan to be useful, it must be created before an interruption occurs. Business continuity is disaster
recovery. Lost revenue is a driving
force in business continuity. The
reason to do a recovery plan is essentially to keep the funding coming in and
the services going, and the clients being served.
-
Emergency
planning are those procedures and steps done immediately after an
interruption to business.
-
Disaster
recovery are the steps taken to restore some functions so that
some level of services can be offered.
-
Business
continuity is restoration planning, completing the full circle to
get your organization back to where it was before an
interruption.
In
order to write your plan, you have to do some planning. This planning is the
process that will get you to the step where you then commit your plan to paper -
you canÂ’t write a plan until you do the preparation. The most difficult thing is getting
started; the second most difficult task is keeping the plan
current.
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The Difference Between Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning Defined
Disaster
Recovery Planning (DRP) is the process by which you resume business
after a disruptive event. This
typically means that you can get the enterprise computers, networks, and data
base operational. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like
malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.
Given the
human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to
ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. However
Janco has found that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate
their Disaster Plans in the last few years.

Business Continuity
Planning (BCP) suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can
keep the enterprise going and meet it business objectives. This goes beyond the
enterprise computers, networks and data bases. However, the two terms are married under
the acronym DR/BC or DRP/BCP. At any rate, Disaster Recovery Planning and/or
Business Continuity Planning facilitate how a company will keep functioning
after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are
restored.
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Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Scope

Recognizing the scope of the requirements, Janco
suggests that you purchase the Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity Template and the do the following:
- Conduct a business impact
assessment. This involved a crossfunctional team to evaluate the
business requirements and tier data based on the importance to our business
operations.
- Protect data and
applications. It was important to back up data frequently to
ensure records are kept, so we needed to upgrade
our backup equipment to a
faster version to reduce the time it took to complete a backup cycle.
- Review power and
connectivity options. We needed to add uninterrupted power
supplies (UPS) and connectivity for critical servers, network connections and
selected personal computers to keep the most essential applications running in
case of a power outage.
- Document, test and update the
disaster preparedness plan. Part of the Janco Disaster Recovery
and Business Continuity Template plan needs you to include updated
configuration diagrams of the hardware, software and network components to be
used in the recovery. The plan also needed to include logistical details, such
as travel to backup sites and spending authorization for emergency
needs.
- Consider
telecommunications alternatives. Often taken for granted,
telecommunications backup involving redundancy and alternatives needed to be
in place - and in the case of spot outages, redundancy may be enough. For
larger outages, alternative communications vehicles, including wireless
phones, wireless data cards and satellite phones, had to be
considered.
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Testing is Critical to Disaster Recovery Planning
Importance
of testing is critical to the disaster recovery and
business continuity planning.
All good disaster recovery
and contingency plans start with having a good solid backup of data.
Although systems and applications can be reinstalled and reconfigured, data
cannot be rebuilt out of thin air. The key to having a good backup is to make
sure the data is correct and can be successfully restored. This is not always as
easy as it seems. One company had such an issue. Their backup administrator did
not correctly follow procedures and when he thought he was doing a backup, he
actually was not writing anything. When they tried to restore a database, they
found out all the tapes were blank.
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Cost of Disaster Recovery Backup Is High For Many Enterprises
The
need for de-duplication is increasing for many organizations as they gather
ever-growing volumes of data. At the same time, they are looking for ways to
reduce storage costs, improve efficiencies and provide adequate disaster
recovery capabilities. The key benefit is the ability to lessen the Total Cost
of Ownership (TCO) of storage hardware by eliminating redundant blocks of data
and then allowing organizations to replicate that data -- if required -- to a
second system for offsite storage. That can remove the need for tape. Data
de-duplication not only allows companies to reduce the disk space needed for
backup and restore, but it can increase performance and reliability while
reducing demands for rack space, power and cooling. Further, it can reduce the
bandwidth requirements for data transfer by 90 percent or
more. ...
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Pandemic Alert Level 5 Requires DRP/BCP Plans be Activated
The World Health Organization has raised the
pandemic alert over the spread of swine flu to phase 5.
WHO says that based on assessment of all available
information and following several expert consultations raised the current level
of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to 5.
While making the annoucement, WHO stated that all
countries should immediately activate their pandemic
preparedness plans. At this stage, effective and essential measures include
heightened surveillance, early detection and treatment of cases, and infection
control in all health facilities.
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Disaster Planning for a Pandemic
In disaster planning when a
pandemic occurs the data center exists but people are in separate locations.
The Disaster Planning and
Business Continuity Planning processes need to make the user and business
operating experience as similar as possible so that the work environment is the
same in the remote site (often home) as in the office. A key requirement is to
increase remote access capabilities in addition before the pandemic occurs the
following planning needs to take place:
- Define necessary staff levels for critical
business processes
- Identify who can work remotely and who has to be
in the office
- Validation of vaccinations for key staff members
- Identify the lights out processing issues for
computer operations staff
- Identify the network and remote access capacity
requirements - what percent of workers do you need to be on the system for the
enterprise to continue to operate
- Train and test of users and IT staffs in how to
operate from remote locations Require key employees to work from remote site
at least once a month
- Validate broadband capacity to remote sites
(home users)
- Have copies of disaster plan available in remote
site
- Put in place process for the synchronization of
OS system patches and VPN updates - if the workstations are not used
frequently disable the auto update features for security updates but maintain
a process to see that they workstations are up-to-date.
- Define specific requirements for security and
PCI-DSS when the disaster plan is activated for a pandemic.
- Define change management and version control
processes to be used and how they will be controlled during the
pandemic.
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