Other Elements Necessary for the Disaster Recovery Plan
My previous three articles cover the Business Impact Assessment, Threat Assessment, and Disaster Incident Response Team. In this article I will share additional screen shots from my Spread sheet that I use to document additional essential elements needed for Disaster Recovery.
Declaring A Disaster or Emergency
There are many other important elements required for your Disaster Recovery Plan. Most importantly, what triggers invoking the Disaster Recover Plan? There are emergencies and disasters where external entities such as government will be the ones that declare a disaster or emergency and those cases will be self-evident. However, for clarity and uniformity especially for events that are not public disasters and are more specific to your business you must identify and document who is authorized to declare a disaster or emergency as well as contingencies if those authorized to declare an emergency or disaster are not available. I use the following tab in my spread sheet for this purpose.
Evacuation of the Facility
Many of the threats we considered in the Threat Assessment are threat which may require the response of evacuating facilities. It is important to document what events do not require any authorization for evacuation and for those events that do require authorization who is authorized to initiate the evacuation. In addition, you must identify and document specific responsibilities of people, if needed for directing the evacuation and checking to make sure that the premises are cleared also need to be identified. Evacuation procedures should be understood by all and should be drilled least an annual basis. I use the following tab to identify the conditions that do not require evacuation authorization, the people authorized to initiate other evacuations and employee responsibilities during an evacuation.
Communications Plan
One of the most important things to plan in advance is communications. Many people need to be contacted and informed both internally and externally. Identifying who needs to be notified for what and how general employee communication are to be handled is critical. I use both a Notification Matrix Tab and Communications Plan tab, see below:
Other Lists
In the Business Impact Assessment we identified the critical processes and resources needed to keep our business running. I do not want to overwhelm you but it is important to document and record information for these items in the Disaster Recovery Plan I use other tabs in my spread sheet to record and document information for many of these, you may need to click on these screen shots to improve readability, they are as follows:
Summary
I know there are several other ways to formulate a Disaster Recovery Plan. What I have tried to do in the information I have shared in these four articles is to provide a structured process and a centralized simple spread sheet format for you to both record and document your Disaster Recovery Plan. I also know that you may wonder about the effort required to gather all the needed information and formulate the plan. The key to successful Disaster Recovery planning is to do the planning in advanced of an emergency or disaster. Once you are in an emergency or disaster you will be very busy with the disaster and emergency and gathering the information you will need to respond to the disaster will be an extra burden you do not want to have. I hope the articles have been helpful to you.