When administrators understand what sorts of failures
can occur and know which services and applications are most critical to
their organization, they have gathered almost all the information
necessary to create a preliminary high-level disaster recovery solution.
Many different pieces of information and several documents will be
required, even for the preliminary solutions. Some of the items required
within the solution are listed in the following sections.
Disaster Recovery Solution Overview Document
The Disaster Recovery
Solution Overview document is a short narrative of the solution in
action, including presentations with quality graphics and/or Microsoft
Visio diagrams. This document first provides an executive summary,
including only high-level details to provide executives and management
with enough information to understand what steps are being taken to
provide business continuity in the event of a disaster. The remainder of
the document should contain detailed information related to the plan,
including many of the following items:
Current computer and network infrastructure review.
Detailed history of the planning meetings and the information that was presented and discussed in those meetings.
The
list of which disaster and outage scenarios will be greatly mitigated
by this plan, and which scenarios will not be addressed by this plan.
Note
Scenarios that will
not be addressed in your organization’s disaster recovery solutions
should still be referenced in the document to show that it was
presented, discussed, and considered very unlikely to occur, too
expensive to mitigate up front, or not important enough to dedicate
budget or staff resources.
The
list of the most critical applications, systems, and services for the
organization and the potential impact to the business if these systems
encounter a failure or are not available.
Description
of the high-level solution, including how the proposed disaster
recovery solution will enhance the organization by improving the
reliability and recoverability.
Defined SLA and RTO time estimates this solution provides to each failure and disaster scenario.
Associated computer and network hardware specifications, including initial purchasing and ongoing support and licensing costs.
Associated software specifications and licensing costs for initial purchase and ongoing support and maintenance costs.
Additional WAN links costs.
Additional
outside services costs, including hosting services, data center lease
costs, offsite disk and tape storage fees, consulting costs for the
project, technical writing, document management, and ongoing support or
lease costs.
Estimated
internal staffing resource assignment and utilization for the solution
deployment, as well as the ongoing utilization requirements to support
the ongoing backup and recovery tasks.
The initial estimated project schedule and project milestones.
Getting Disaster Recovery Solutions Approved
Prioritizing and
identifying the bare minimum services are not only the responsibility of
the IT staff; these decisions belong to management as well. The IT
staff is responsible for identifying single points of failure, gathering
the statistical information of application and service usage, and
possibly also understanding how an outage can affect business
operations.
Before the executives can
make a decision regarding budget for an organization’s disaster recovery
plan, they should be presented with as much information as possible to
make the most informed decision. As a general guideline, when presenting
the preliminary disaster recovery solution, make sure it includes the
“In a perfect world with unlimited budget” plan, along with one or two
lower-cost plans with clearly highlighted extended downtime or reduced
functionality. Presenting alternate plans highlighting different costs
and results might help ensure that the solution gets approval in one
form or another.
Getting the budget
approved for a secondary disaster recovery solution is better than
getting no budget for the preferred solution. The staff should always
try to be very clear on the SLA for a chosen solution and to document or
have a paper trail concerning all disaster recovery solutions that have
been accepted or denied. If a failure that could have been planned for
occurs but budget was denied, IT staff members or IT managers should
make sure to have all their facts straight and documentation to prove
it.
