Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery is the ability of an organization to minimize the effects of a disaster that would disrupt normal business operations.

To minimize development disruption during a disaster, a proper SCM DR Plan is required.

The purpose of this page is to establish a standard for DR for systems, applications and their configurations.

By classifying each system and application into one of four categories.

These categories are Vital, Critical, Important and Deferred.

Management Commitment

A sound DR (Business Continuity) plan is essential to ensure an organization survives a disaster.

This cannot really be over emphasized.

Yet many companies still side step the issue or hold plans which are clearly out of date or inadequate.

High Availability

High Availability, HA, is considered a system that up 100% of the time.

Now, no system is operational 100% of the time.

So, a commonly believed standard of availability is "five 9s", 99.999%.

DR Matrix

Step	Description
Risk Analysis	Create a thorough risk analysis of your computer systems Define outage threats Prioritize the threats Categorize the threats into low, medium and high
Determine your DR Budget	It is typically considered that for every dollar spent in prevention, will be $10 spent in recovery Determine where your prevention money will be best spent DR budgets usually run between 2-8% of a companies overall IT budget Best Practices usually state that well run IT shops spend 15% on DR
Develop a DR Plan	When must the business be up and running after a disaster Most businesses assume they need to be up and running 24 to 48 hours after an incident The plan should be a detailed description of what everyone needs to do to accomplish the recovery Do not forget about cross-team communication during the recovery
Test	Once you have the DR Plan defined, Test, Test and Retest! This is where you will find defects, bad assumptions and gaps in your Disaster Recovery Plan It should be tested yearly

Links

• Software Configuration Management Processes
• SCM DR Plan
• Disaster Recovery Forum