Disaster Recovery Plan Template
Business Continuity Planning
ISO 27000, ISO 27001,
ISO 27002 (formerly ISO 17799),
Sarbanes - Oxley, PCI-DSS, and
HIPAA Compliant

• 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.
• 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).

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

• 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.