Wait! Don’t go! I know this is a horrendously boring topic but I’ll try my best to make itsomewhat interesting…
For a while now I’ve been knee deep in planning how the IT department at uptime would respond in an emergency, or disaster. It’s not an easy task. In fact, when I sit down to write the plan I become consumed by it and find myself expanding the document beyond it’s scope. It has become one large brain-dump document and, while useful as reference material, it would help little in the event of an emergency.
With this document looming over me like the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, I decided to break it down into manageable chunks, and break out the meat of the document into an Interim DR Plan. As DR can be daunting, and take a considerable amount of time, an interim DR plan can help you out of a sticky situation should one arise. It’s better than having nothing while you build your comprehensive response plan.
In a nutshell, an interim plan is…
- A low-effort, quick-to-market plan. Don’t spend more than 20-30 person-hours on it.
- An outline of how your business can continue operations with limited resources in the event of a disaster.
- Not a substitute a full DR plan. Though it can and should be a framework for building out your comprehensive DR plan.
Your Interim DR plan may contain:
- Emergency response team members, and all their contact information
- The Disaster Declaration Procedure — How the business actually declares an emergency.
- Communications procedures – How your emergency response team will communicate before, during and after the recovery efforts.
- Recovery Plan Procedures – This is the hard part, but in essence is a description of recovery procedures, alternate locations and contingencies for the business functions identified in the plan.
- Background information – Who owns, sponsors and updates the plan. How often the DR team should meet, and the document update frequency.
- Preventative Measures – Simple things like off-site backups, or data replication to a secure location can save loads of time and money. Consider moving to Software as a Service for critical business functionality. I’ll write a post on SaaS later. I’m not a big fan, but in the event of a disaster it could just save your hide.
Once you’ve documented the plan, publish it and store it in several locations. Even consider putting it online somewhere outside of your infrastructure.
uptime software has a DR plan in effect and we continue to evolve it over time to meet our needs. We are confident that, should disaster strike, our operations will continue relatively unharmed. If you are looking at server monitoring solutions elsewhere, ask them if they will be able to support you if their operation catches fire, or floods, or endures an earthquake. uptime will.
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