EESSIS® Disaster Recovery Plan - Business Continuity Management Support

EESSIS® Business Systems Continuity Management Services

Why should my company invest in a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?

Scenario; new company, year 2, 400 clients

“My company doesn’t require a Disaster Recovery Plan; we backup our entire system data everyday and always ensure that the backup media is off-site and properly secured!”

Year 3, 2000 clients – human error – requires data restore

“Our latest backup media tape failed but we successfully restored from an earlier tape. Although business is back to normal we had three days downtime and had to re-key an entire days worth of transactions! Maybe now we should consider instigating a DRP or at least duplicate backup to an offsite storage server?”

Year 5, 7000 clients - no DRP – server failure –replacement required

“Our IT Support Company has just informed us that a suitable replacement for our server is no longer available and our data application and backup media is machine specific! Now what do we do? It will take weeks to track down suitable hardware and to make matters worse we have our VAT return and year end to process. We still have paper documentation to work with, right?”

Can your company afford not to have DRP policy in place?

EESSIS® DRP Implementation Process

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) insured up to £1M

Business Impact: Analyse and document disaster impact on resource and revenue loss
Management Support: Identify senior management that will support and oversee the DRP project and apply roles
System and Business Inventory: Gather system models, s/n, software licenses, vendor support, energy supplier details, staff contact details etc.
Alternate Working Premises: Assign various local venues as temporary office premises and identify resource required
Risk Assessment (RA): Identify internal and external business risks and associated costs
Identify Resource: Identify internal and external resource available to deal with specific risks
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s): Compile SOP’s for each identified risk and include an unidentified risk procedure
Standard Escalation Procedures (SEP’s): Create SOP specific SEP and overall SEP’s
Resource Escalation Procedures(REP’s): Compile available resource for an unpredicted SOP affect
Notification Escalation Procedures(NEP’s): Identify when and what resource to use for SEP’s
Procedure Test Analysis: Test and analyse DRP under controlled conditions
Revise DRP: Log every system, business and environment change and initiate associated updates to DRP

Disaster Prevention (DP)

Server Environment Assessment: Identify gaps in security (CCTV, access, firewalls, anti-virus etc) - temperature and humidity assessment
System Life-Cycle: Assess realistic life expectancy for hardware
Key Staff Assessment: Assess staff awareness towards security and instigate any training required
Data Protection: Assess data protection compliance under the Data Protection Act. This is a legal requirement should hardware containing customer data falls into the wrong hands
Fault Tolerance: Assess RAID systems, power redundancy, multiple storage adapters etc
System Backup and Backup Verification: Assess backup procedures including verification and restore testing
Workstation and Portable PC backup: Assess “Portables” backup procedures (frequently overlooked)
Recovery Disks: Assess periodic ASR disk creation
Boot Disks: Although no longer essential creating boot disks adds one more method of recovery
Recovery Drives: Utilise any unused SCSI drives and configure as recovery drives

As every DRP is unique the lead-time to completion is on average 3 - 7 weeks (frequently considerably longer depending on project size). On completion your company will receive the final format in the form of hard copies, CD copies and an up-to-date “always available” online copy. DRP content will be clearly presented using basic flowcharts outlining every step required to successfully restore business systems and data – each chart will point to the associated section within the DRP.

DRP implementation is just the beginning of a long-term commitment. Any changes to your business that reflect on your DRP’s effectiveness must be reviewed on a regular basis. Using our own CMS software, we can perform a quick and accurate update to your DRP version. All amendments will be delivered as updates clearly stating the sections to amend. Full updated versions will be supplied on the CD and online.