Strategic Decisions

Issues IT Business Recovery Planning Has to Address

In planning for recovery of IT services, most organizations follow variants of these basic steps.

• Provide top-management guidelines.

• Identify serious risks. (See Chapter 5 concerning risk assessment.)

• Prioritize the services to be maintained , and standardize their maintenance.

• Assign the disaster team.

• Take a complete inventory.

• Document the plan.

• Train employees .

• Test the plan.

• Review with all employees.

For the most part, business continuity planning for IT services involves following the outlined actions and completing templates. The three notable exceptions are the strategy employed to deal with distributed systems, the strategy for backups , and the recovery facility.