IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Bootstrapping the DR Plan Effort

Putting a full disaster recovery (DR) effort into place for your organization can take a year or two, from inception, to Business Impact Analysis, to plan development and testing. A proper DR project must wrap its arms around the entire business (or, at any rate, around those parts of the business you choose to place in-scope for the project because they're important enough to warrant DR planning); perform a deep analysis of business processes; untangle and analyze dependencies among processes, information systems, assets, and suppliers; and begin building the DR plans themselves.

A DR project is a considerable effort for you to start—and complete. You can take some different approaches to get started. You might think of these approaches as differences in styles, or as ways of addressing operational gaps or risks:

• Conduct a full DR project. You can just jump into the big DR project, starting with the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), criticality analysis, risk analysis, and specific recovery plans for IT systems.

• Start with a short-term project. Then again, you might decide to build an emergency operations plan first, just in case a disaster occurs before you complete the main DR plan. Creating an emergency operations plan—basically, an established command-and-control structure and a communications plan without any actual recovery procedures—can help you identify and document top-down management structures and communications that need to take ...