DR Plan Development

The plan content

A Disaster Recovery Plan, or ICT Service Continuity Plan, should be written in a clear and succinct manner that will be prove an effective management tool in the event of a disruption of IT and comms services. Information to be incorporated within the DR Plan is likely to include:

1. Introduction stating purpose, scope, objectives, assumptions, associated documents and other useful background information
2. Summary of IT and comms recovery strategy and how this links in with the organisation’s business continuity strategy
3. Roles and responsibilities of response/recovery teams and individuals
4. Escalation and incident management flowcharts and communication flows
5. Business and resource recovery priorities and timescales
6. General DR Team incident management tasks and resource recovery task tables split into appropriate technical focus areas
7. Plan maintenance and exercising schedule
8. Key contact details
9. Incident assessment and management logs
10. Other relevant information to aid recovery

Producing the plan

Teed consultants can facilitate discussions with technical representatives to obtain the necessary information to include within the DR Plan, ensuring that best use is made of everyone’s time and the information from the different technical areas integrates effectively. Whilst drafting the DR Plan information in a manner that would aid reference post event, all pre-incident solution implementation and risk mitigation activity will also be noted. This will allow a DR Implementation Actions Table to be documented in a manner that will allow this to be used as an effective project management tool during the strategy implementation process.

Consider the detail

Detailed technical recovery procedures should be referred to within the plan and kept separately in a secure location that would be readily available offsite in electronic &/or paper form. When developing the DR Plan the required procedures can be simply be noted as an action within the DR implementation actions list. Some organisations choose to actually document these procedures during the implementation or testing phases. All plans and procedures should be written at a level of detail that assumes some unavailability of key technical staff – everyone should be confident that the recovery will succeed in the event of their absence.