It Service Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan Sample New York Village
IT disaster recovery plan templates: Three helpful examples to get you started
If you're tech savvy, you probably know a lot about computers, smartphones, and networking hardware. But understanding how gear works is one thing, while being responsible for the continuous availability of the IT services that dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of an organization's employees depend on is a whole different ball game ... and that's what IT departments are responsible for.
With money on the line, every minute of downtime can cost a business dearly. And in the information age, a total data loss event could be absolutely catastrophic for a company. Therefore, the IT departments who help ensure access to data are critical to keeping any organization afloat.
Disaster preparedness starts with a plan
If you're familiar with the Boy Scouts, you know their motto is "be prepared!" And that's exactly what IT professionals are charged with—making sure companies can continue to operate no matter what unfortunate event might occur. And if you've been in Spiceworks long enough, you've probably heard that whether it comes in the form of hardware failure, destructive weather events, or human error, "it's not a matter of if disaster will strike, it's a matter of when."
The question then to ask is, would your IT department be able to quickly recover your data in the event of a catastrophic loss? And how exactly would you get back up and running? You might have an idea in your mind, but without documenting the risks and threats, walking through probable scenarios, and figuring out the steps you need to take to recover from an event, you can't know for sure how resilient your organization might be.
But what if you don't know where to start? If you need help putting together an IT disaster recovery (DR) plan, or improving the one you've already got, we've got you covered.
Three disaster recovery templates for IT departments
To give you a better idea of what other companies are doing, many of your fellow SpiceHeads have shared both great advice and templates they've used in disaster recovery planning.
There's no perfect way to create a DR plan, as all organizations are different, so one size doesn't fit all. Check out the three disaster recovery templates below, so you can pick and choose elements from each in order to build build an effective DR plan for your organization.
Adams State College information technology disaster recovery plan
In a candid discussion about finding a customizable DR template, rmuniz9336 outlined four steps that are critical to any IT disaster recovery planning exercise. Specifically, he mentioned mitigation, planning, response, and recovery.
And to help other IT pros get started, he offered up this DR plan for a small college, which can be adapted for any organization. From risk assessment of critical services, to points of contact, to a plan of action for when disaster strikes, this document helps IT pros understand what steps to take to successfully recover computer services in the event of a disaster.
Generic IT template for recovering from a disaster
In IT, documentation is important. In a how-to article about how to create the various agreements, administration overviews, business proposals, and contracts involved with the job, SpiceHead Alex Scheidel also shared his disaster recovery overview and backup documentation for management.
While this isn't a pure IT disaster recovery plan, it very specifically focuses on mitigation steps and backup procedures the organization follows to protect against failures in specific computer systems. As an added bonus, this document contains a proposal on how to make the current backup system even more resilient.
Any Bank disaster recovery template
This third example of a disaster recovery plan comes from ITSlave, who used this template as a framework for his organization. He shared it on Spiceworks for other IT pros who "don't want to reinvent the wheel."
This template is the most comprehensive of the three, even covering a bit of business continuity planning, which includes non-IT items such as chain of command, disaster notification procedures, and business impact analysis. Pages 12-14 of the document examines various IT services and defines parameters such as maximum allowable downtime, personnel required to recover each service, potential risks factors that might impact the service, and the monetary losses associated with a failure.
Follow these examples and prosper
We sincerely hope that these three templates can help you get started on your DR planning, or improve existing measures you may have in place. If you have any additional tips or templates to share, please leave a comment below!
DR plans are like the backups that should be part of them. You need to test your DR plan, and in various disaster scenarios.
Also running practice tabletop sessions with representatives from all departments so that everyone has a chance to get a feel for what they would need to be doing and what to expect from others can help things run much smoother when an actual situation happens. It also gives more opportunities for people to give input about something that might have been missed or a better way to handle certain things.
Props to the Spiceheads who shared!
lots of phone numbers in that bank plan. I have to wonder if all of them are live (home/cell phone/etc)
DRPs are maybe the most boring and monotonous tasks to do in the IT department, but they're also undoubtedly one of the most important. Having templates to use to help build out sections and definitions make building a DRP much less daunting. Even beyond making a DRP, staying on top of documentation and including each new thing in the DRP is essential. Though I try to keep generalized terms in play in any DRP, given as some of our clients like to purchase their own solutions without consulting first; it should be a "one size fits all" template that is hand-tailored on a per-client basis and visited at least once a year with clientele. Thanks for sharing!
Members who share stuff like this deserve to be stalked. Following all three now. Thanks guys.
Now following all 3!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Just what I needed.
I backup the machines with Rollback for the data, Drive Cloner for the system. Drive Cloner images are on the network, and I also have a master image on my own personal USB.
For our Servers I use Rollback Server and Veeam.
I appreciate the sharing of resources. Even if a template doesn't fit another organization very closely, each one has elements that can inspire DR plan sections that plan authors might not otherwise think of.
That said, the "Generic IT template for recovering from a disaster" is not really a DR Plan template. It is more of a memo to management describing an existing collection antiquated servers and backup methods and suggesting, not very emphatically, some changes that are long overdue. It laudably recommends server virtualization and offsite backups. Oi! No offsite backups now? Someone needs to sound the alarm!
I understand that many organizations have outdated computer and backup systems. It is not the author's fault that his organization does not have adequate protection. He may not be in a position to make forceful recommendations. But perhaps he can speak with some higher-up to explain the seriousness of the unmitigated risks and that person can make the case to the organization.
By the way, the fire-proof safe relied on in the template should be kept locked, not to prevent theft, but to allow the safe to work as designed. It is best if it is on a basement floor to avoid damage from falling through a burning floor. And the tapes or drives inside should be in moisture-proof boxes.
Very useful, thank you for sharing.
Great information. Thanks so much for sharing!
This is amazing! Thank you for sharing. I will be updating ours since the Hurricane season is pretty serious this year.
Very good article! We already have a DR plan in place, but it is good to see the templates and be able to compare ours against theirs to see if we are missing anything or even pat ourselves on the back when we see that ours might have something that theirs is missing.
Very nice templates! Never no where to look when I need one! Thanks
One of the most important items that need to be in the DR plan? Who is doing what and when. Responsibility goes to a human person with decision ability, processes are groups never own up to getting the job done. Excluding a RACI chart in the plan will solidify the action when needed.
https://www.teamgantt.com/blog/raci-chart-definition-tips-and-example
I like the idea of role-playing the DR plan with those would be main POCs in the event of a DR plan execution! Genius. Thanks for the write-up!
Things really started getting nice in this field, when we started being able to run bare metal restores to the same hardware or dissimilar hardware, and if this last not available right away, restore from a physical machine backup, to a VM. The beauty of shadow copy, and backup systems being able to mount a shareable point with portions or a full computer backup.
Thanks to the ones sharing the templates, tremendous value!
Source: https://community.spiceworks.com/storage/articles/2778-it-disaster-recovery-plan-templates-three-helpful-examples-to-get-you-started
1. Who is going to be working?
2. How are they going to get working?
3. How long until you recover 80 percent?