Scope

---

Getting Started

Always include an objective, site-specific details, and a list of terms to be used throughout your document. This is all of your up-front information that you want to reader to understand; it should also give those who are not necessarily the ones executing the plan the ability to comprehend just what the plan will accomplish if done successfully. Doing it in this manner accomplishes a couple of things:

• Eliminates confusion

• Sets expectations for the use of this plan at the outset

Let's look at the following example of a DR plan.

SAMPLE DR PLAN

OBJECTIVE

Maintain the <Company Name>'s ability to continue to service customers, complete sales, and deliver their online services in a global market place. This ability hinges on four primary data centers located across the United States and Canada.

These data centers consist of mainly decentralized servers that once were singularly located on legacy mainframe hardware. Therefore, the protection of the data of these systems with regular duplications and off-site storage with enough detail to facilitate recovery is critical to the success of this plan. As part of this plan, regular testing will be scheduled to ensure the company's ability to survive a disaster.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Assessment team. This person or group of persons will be responsible for assessing the level of damage the disaster caused to the organization's facilities, IT infrastructure, intellectual property (data), and so on. This team may consist of a number of different business units depending on the depth and breadth of the DR plan.

Business-critical. Defined as any resource, be it data, applications, personnel, and so on, that would be second (to mission-critical; see below) in priority in the plan of recovery in the event of disaster, loss, or interruption. An example of a business-critical application may be payroll and accounting.

Business interruption. Any event whether planned or unplanned that disrupts the normal course of business operations at one of your locations, which if not addressed within a predetermined amount of time may turn into a disaster.

Disaster. A disaster is declared when an event or chain of events results in the inability of an organization to provide critical business functions for a period of time and/or causes the company to move from using standard operating procedures to employing its disaster recovery plan after a predetermined period of time, potentially at another facility.

Emergency on-call. This is the front line in the event of a disaster. This person or group of persons will be contacted in the event of a disaster, and they, as part of the response team, will execute this plan and begin the process of recovery.

Functional critical. Noncritical back-office functions such as file and print.

Management team. The person or group of persons managing the entire execution of the DR plan. This team will ultimately have full responsibility for the success or failure of the DR plan.

Mission-critical. Defined as any resource, be it data, applications, personnel, and so on, that would be of the highest priority in the plan of recovery in the event of disaster, loss, or interruption. An example might be online ordering or reservations systems.

Recovery team. The person or group of persons that will take on the responsibility of the actual recovery process. This may involve restoration of the data from backup media or, in fact, the management of the restoration of physical infrastructure, facilities, and so on. This team may include a number of different people representing a number of different business units.

Response team. The person or group of persons responsible for carrying out the declaration of and recovery from a disaster.

---