Sunday, 18 February 2018 Blog ehdf

What constitutes an IT DR plan?

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a tabulated, organized and methodical approach with detailed instructions and preconceived responses to mediate accidental and unexpected disruptions. It is a comprehensive plan that includes anticipatory precautions, refined and scenario based reactions, reserve resources and redundancies so that the impact of a disaster can be contained and the enterprise can sustain essential operations as well as resume critical functions rapidly and with relative ease.

Preparing a DRP – getting started

A typical DRP begins with a methodical analysis of the processes and functions that are central to the organization and creates a framework that can assist in maintaining the continuity and integrity of those elements. Preparation for Disaster Recovery is not merely an ideal scenario or desirable functional capability anymore, it is a critical and self-evidently non-negotiable aspect of running a modern business.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

An effective Disaster Recovery Plan should evolve from a strategic perspective and begin with determining which processes are most central to the functional integrity of the enterprise. The plan must include defined metrics for various important parameters. For instance, a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) creates a specific target for the maximum duration for which a business process can be compromised before it jeopardizes the goals and permissible functional leeway of the organization. Similarly, a DRP also needs to define the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which describes the point in time to which the capacities and corresponding details of an application must be restored to. Disaster Recovery in Dubai and the UAE would also need to take into account the specifics of the region – its vulnerabilities as well as strengths and how each of those affect the final outcomes desired.

DRP differs across businesses

The strategic core of the DRP is specific to each organization, its business model, the nature of its operations, the nature of the data that it processes, as well as the philosophy and goals of an organization. This aspect of the DRP involves the participation of the management group of the enterprise in a very fundamental way. The management group is responsible for identifying the specifics that drive the strategy as well as approving the responses and structure that is developed to address the preparedness of the organization.

Common priorities of a DRP

Having identified the elements that, it seeks to address, as well as the variables it need to take into account, a Disaster Recovery plan can then begin to take shape around these specifics. Some of the most common priorities for a DRP are ensuring that critical IT infrastructure – such as networks, servers and databases – can maintain their integrity to best extent possible under various stresses and disruptions, ensuring that the RTO can be met and the creation of a strategic outline to which the recovery process needs to adhere. The DRP can emphasize differing priorities based on the consensus arrived at by the management group. For instance, certain organizations emphasize the integrity of their data while others put being able to restore essential operations at their core. For enterprises that handle sensitive data or are critically dependent on their data, Cloud based Disaster Recovery – which allows the company to store backup versions of data in a Cloud environment – can ensure that valuable data remains uncompromised and accessible. Additionally, priorities can be addressed in such a way as to target minimal disruption and the containment of negative outcomes, or one can even aspire to a more comprehensive response that seeks to recover the functional ability of the organization to a more comprehensive extent.

Test your DRP

Once formulated, it is essential that a DRP is tested thoroughly, periodically updated to reflect changes within the organization as well as its larger operating environment and all stakeholders trained and appraised of all the elements that they may require to perform tasks assigned to them, in the case of a disruption precipitated by a disaster.