[no subject]

From: Debbie Stewart <Debbie_Stewart -at- SIECOR -dot- COM>
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 12:20:33 -0400

Hello Mary and fellow techwhirlers,

All the responses that have been posted have been very good posting! A
business continuity plan is Prevention, Response, Resumption,
Recovery, Restoration. Remeber your *three-Rs*? Now you have five!

You need to determine what your business critical functions are, determine
the level of disaster and determine the appropriate recovery
procedures. For a corporate wide plan, you can not "what if. . . "
your plan to death. You can have general company procedures to follow
- remember the fire drills at school, remember the tornado drills?
Disaster recovery is more about making sure you have the data in
order to resume business. Having reliable data storage and backup
procedures is essential to maintain data integrity. Information asset
protection!!!

From there, each department should have disaster recovery procedures -
the mail room will have procedures for when UPS or the post office
is on strike; the data center should have contingency/recovery plans.
There should be contracts for either hot or cold sites, plans for
data recovery, personnel contact lists with backup personnel listed;
hardware vendor contracts for replacing equipment; forms vendors
holding emergency forms supplies, etc, etc, and the list is long.

For starters you need to make sure management is willing to provide you
with the time, tools, and money to develop the plan. You need to
develop the plan at the corporate level, involving civil emergency
services; the departmental level, then personnel level. You need to
develop the plan, but most importantly, you need to *test* your plan.
This is most often overlooked, unbudgeted for, or simply not given
the importance, but it is *vital* to you plan.

I am responsible for developing the drp for our information services
department, then going to our outlying plants, and help IS
departments develop their plans. Corporate plans are in the works
that involve the whole corporation - which plant location would help
which plant in a disaster, where do personnel go if there is a
tornado, how should personnel respond to bomb threats, etc. It makes
it mandatory for each business unit within the corporate family to
have plans and to test those plans. During the re-development of our
plan, we found out that we had a 24 hour window where data was
unrecoverable. This is not acceptable! We have reduced our window and
continue to where we hope to close that window, and at a reasonable
cost.

Here are some good sites for resources:

http://www.drj.com/ Disaster Recovery Journal - they have a great
article for new planners and great resources.

http://www.rothstein.com Rothestein Disaster Recovery - has a
catalog of books all on D/R

htt://www.colorado.edu/hazards Natural Hazards Center

http://www.binomial.com/ Binomial - a planning software - also
offers seminars on D/R and business planning

http://www.survive.com Survive! is a business continuity group
with tons of resources

http://www.fema.gov Federal Emergency Management Agency

http://www.disaster-resource.com Yep, disaster recovery resources

Check these sites out and you will find dozens more. There are hundreds of
companies that offer business continuity planning or planning
software. Search the internet for business continuity, contingency
planning, disaster recovery, recovery services, data recovery,
business resumption planning, electonic vaulting. You will be
overwhelmed by the amount of information available to you. Call if
you have any questions. Good luck!


Debbie Stewart
Lone Tech Writer
Siecor Operations, LLC
Hickory NC
704-327-5143
debbie -dot- stewart -at- siecor -dot- com

Opinions expressed are mine alone; who else would express these opinions?

Mary Kunzweiler wrote:

<snip> I need to document a corporate-wide disaster recovery plan.
Does anybody know the types of info covered in such a plan? I know I need
to
cover topics like "Tornado wipes out manufacturing plants, here's our
plan",
"Bubonic plague keeps 3/4 work force at home, here's our plan" and "UPS
goes on
strike, here's our plan." Do I lump disasters under major categories, such
as
"Natural disaster recovery" "Personnel disaster recovery" "Vendor disaster
recovery" etc.? What categories am I missing?
Does anybody have templates or example plans they'd be willing to share
(in
MSWord)?
Do URLs to web sites that discuss disaster recovery plans exist? If so,
what
are these URLs?
Thanks,
Mary <snip>




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