Disaster Recovery Planning: Ensuring Business Continuity

You Will Learn How To

Create, document and test continuity arrangements for your organisation
Perform a risk assessment and Business Impact Assessment (BIA) to identify vulnerabilities
Select and deploy an alternate site for continuity of mission-critical activities
Identify appropriate strategies to recover the infrastructure and processes
Organise and manage recovery teams
Test and maintain an effective recovery plan in a rapidly changing technology environment

Course Benefits

A major disaster could cripple your organisation, suspending mission-critical processes and disrupting service to your customers. In this course, you learn to identify vulnerabilities and implement appropriate countermeasures to prevent and mitigate threats to your mission-critical processes. You learn techniques for creating a business continuity plan (BCP) and the methodology for building an infrastructure that supports its effective implementation.

Who Should Attend

Anyone responsible for ensuring the continuity of an organisation's critical systems or processes, including project and business managers, help desk personnel and human resources professionals.

Workshop Course

Through a series of interactive small-group workshops and an evolving case study, you design and develop a disaster recovery plan. Workshops include:

Assessing threats
Avoiding disasters
Identifying the impact on critical business functions
Recognising alternatives for continuing business functions
Planning your continuity project
Organising team structures for use in an emergency
Creating a recovery plan from the response to a disaster

Course Content

Introduction and Overview

Business continuity vs. disaster recovery
Why a recovery plan is a crucial asset
Sources of threat
Codes of practice and legislative requirements

Measuring Risk and Avoiding Disaster

Assessing risk in the enterprise

Choosing the assessment method
The five-step risk process
Matching the response to the threat

Identifying mission-critical continuity needs

Evaluating which functions are critical
Setting priorities based on time horizons
Prioritising processes and applications

Implementing disaster avoidance

Avoiding disasters by taking effective preventive actions
Creating contingency plans for unavoidable threats

The four-step Business Impact Assessment (BIA)

Identifying the threat
Assessing the risk to the enterprise
Identifying business-critical activities
Specifying required IT support from technical staff

Designing Recovery Solutions

Establishing a disaster recovery site

Site choices: configuration and acquisition
Choosing suppliers: in-house vs. third-party
Specifying equipment

Selecting backup and restore strategies

Matching strategy to operational constraints
Meeting the organisation's storage requirements for vital records

Restoring communications and recovering users

Determining vital users with the BIA
Rerouting voice, mail, goods delivery
Eliminating network single points of failure
Connecting end users
Meeting varied user-recovery needs

Implementing a Project Management Approach

Managing and documenting the planning project

Identifying stakeholders
Analysing stakeholder needs
Obtaining the funding commitments
Defining clear goals at the start

Running the project

Controlling the project via tracking
Managing risks and issues
Testing deliverables

Responding to Disaster

Creating the recovery plan

Capturing the planning output
Creating recovery-team charters
Defining roles and responsibilities
Responding to recovery scenarios
Information directories and equipment inventories

Directing the disaster recovery teams

Planning and conducting Crisis Communications
Connecting with emergency services
Team actions following a disaster

Assuring the Plan and Applying Document Management

Rehearsing the business continuity plan

The reasons for testing the plan
Considering the impact on the organisation's activities
Using a step-by-step process to test the plan
Developing test scenarios and using test results effectively

Maintaining the business continuity plan

Applying change control: why and how
Ensuring normal developments are accounted for in the plan
Scheduling regular reviews
Applying document management discipline to the plan

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