Before Planning for Disaster Recovery

Before Planning for Disaster Recovery

I posted before The Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recover, I will explain more about disaster recovery, and I hope these information will help you to build an accurate disaster recovery plan that meets your organization strategy and needs.

One of the most important steps for IT people is to create “Business Impact Analysis” (BIA) before planning for disaster recovery at any organization, BIA is essential to success your disaster recovery planning, no matter how you do it whether by using computer software, survey, interview …etc., and by internal team or external team through contract with outsourcing company.

The benefits of BIA are to gather information to help the organization in planning for disaster recovery , design the disaster recovery site and prioritize computer application and software used by business/functional departments and keep the IT people focused on achieving the goals and objectives of disaster recovery.

BIA is a tool to document information about applications; all information will be analyzed to help the organization in disaster recovery planning. Sometimes you need experts to handle analyzing BIAs and document all analysis results to develop accurate disaster recovery plans.

The continent of BIA template is include but not limited to:

          1-      Name of application,

          2-      Department name,

          3-      Work hours for this application (i.e from 8:00 Am to 9:00 Am),

          4-      Number of users,

          5-      Effect on organization ( i.e Reputation, Cost, Legal..etc),

          6-      Key process for the application (i.e Reports to government, customer service, billing…etc.),

          7-      There is any alternative procedure when application is down,

          8-      Related Hardware and Software,

          9-      Infrastructure needed, and

          10-   Application administrator name.