Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster Recovery Plan 1

Project Overview/Introduction

With most companies having a backup plan, they do not see the need of implementing a Disaster Recovery Plan. Backing up the data will only take care of one aspect of the issues in case of disaster, but it will not protect the company for when the disaster actually hits. Without a Disaster Recovery Plan in place, it will be impossible for the company of any size, even this one, to determine the functionality of their business. Therefore, having a Disaster Recovery Plan will help this company to identify which functions need to be restored first.

A company of this size, of 120 employees, 1 Central Office building housing the Data Center, and 5 remote offices with 8 dedicated servers, 2 database servers and 5 application servers providing all of the business system functionalities will need to put in place a Disaster Recovery Plan in order to protect or correct the issues that might cause problems with IT or data storage system. Below I will outline the need of having a Disaster Recovery Plan for this company.

First it is very important to know that there are many threats that are out there just waiting to destroy the system apart from fires and floods. There are also malicious hackers who are just waiting for an opening to destroy the company's vital information. Disasters can happen without warning; it can be natural disaster like blackouts caused by storms or just faulty wirings to the spilling of a cup of coffee. With disasters being unpredictable, it is very imperative to implement a Disaster Recovery Plan before the company has more at stake to lose.

In addition, the loss of important data can harm a business and can lead for clients to lose confidence in the company. Not only that, it can also cause confusion when problems arise and on one would not know what to do. The company needs to think about the cost that it might

Disaster Recovery Plan 2

incur if the plan is not in place for the recovery after the disaster hit

How long can this Organization function without its datacenter

Instead of waiting for the disaster to occur, management should be interested in formalizing a plan which will maintain business continuity and be able to protect the system at the same time.

In order to have a plan in place, the company needs to understand that without the datacenter, the organization is not able to function well. Though the cost of the server downtimes varies from company to company, the estimate can be anywhere from 1 million to 3 million dollars per year, for a small to a medium company of revenue lost, user salaries, and server outage. (Regan, 2006)

System Recovery Schedule

In order to have a functional datacenter even within the midst of disaster, the company needs to think of several systems recovery schedules which will allow the data center to run with no or little interruption as possible. The use of a warm-site technology with a duplicate server will prove to be cost effective because the duplicate server will always be available to replace any server that fails. This will enable the organization to recover its critical information in a shorter time than if all components of the server that had failed had to be ordered and configured at the time of the system failure.

As an Organization, we need to identify the critical and non critical systems so the prioritization can be implemented to keep the business going. All departments believe that the work they do is business critical, but a meeting with all department heads need to be scheduled so guidelines can be given as to what is business critical and what