When creating your disaster recovery plan, pre planning is vital. Follow these 3 steps to ensure you have all the elements to design a robust disaster recovery strategy.
1. Understand the risks to business continuity
A good way to do this is using the business model PESTLE.
This model breaks down into Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental considerations. Using the outline of this model you can evaluate the ‘mesoeconomic’ (areas where the business operates and can have limited influence on the impact) or ‘macroeconomic’ environments (which the business is impacted by but has no control over).
Work though each area in relation to your business and/or product areas focusing on the risks that could exist for each area. – Does this relate to the above break down?
2. Define the ultimate objective of your Business Continuity Plan
The aim of an emergency and business continuity plan is to mitigate the effects of any catastrophe that might occur within or adjacent to the premises. The plan will support your relationships with your stakeholders and give customers confidence.
What is priority? Back office systems underpinning the business, or getting customer facing departments up and running while you work on systems to support the business?
3. Collate the information to be included in the disaster recovery pack
- Create clearly defined courses of action
- Construct a system for the recording of resources
- Identify ‘Key Holder’ personnel, resources and functions
- Identify critical systems and functions and define alternative procedures
- Identify additional short term resources required for supporting partial operation
- Identify those who must be notified and kept informed of the incident
- Document the location of data (electronic and paper) and identify off-site storage
Once you have all of this information you can begin work on creating the plan for your business. To find out more about creating a disaster recovery plan, download our Whitepaper.