Recovery Plan Executive Summary

Presentation regarding the university’s Disaster Recovery Plan/Enterprise Continuity Plan including: basic structures; roles within the DRP/ECP plan; areas within a company if addressed improve resilience to catastrophic events, and an employee awareness campaign.

Availability keeps data and resources available for authorized use, especially during emergencies or disasters. This policy will address common challenges to availability. Denial of Service this is due to intentional attacks or because of undiscovered flaws in implementation. The policy will address loss of information system capabilities because of natural disasters. The policy will also focus on equipment failures during normal use.

Good Business Continuity Planning starts with being proactive. That means taking concrete steps to plan for an incident much before it actually strikes. There is no one single approach that fits for all types of incidents as no two emergencies are identical. Much of business continuity planning varies based on the size of the company, company’s line of business, and the locations of the company, customers and suppliers.

The business continuity & disaster recovery is written into the policy to ensure each department knows and has a plan in case of an unexpected event such as a fire, vandalism, and natural disaster that would disrupt normal business. This part of the plan also states that data administrators are the ones responsible to implement procedures for critical backup of data and how long the recovery time would be which is set by the data stewards and other stockholders.

There will be a disaster plan in place for such things as floods, storms, of equipment failure. All customer information will be backed up and on a secure network and system with password protected group policies.

A BCP should cover all of the things that could cease regular business operation. Once that has been establish, then we will need to determine what is required for continue operation during a disaster. Then who are the key personnel and what their job will be in support of the continue operation. Identify the key equipment, storage data area and the secondary location at least 30-50 miles away from your primary position.

from, and recover from for the main servers and web services is a good idea.

MAGALHAES, R. (2005, MAY). THE BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN RECOVERY DOCUMENT. RETRIEVED ON FEBRUARY 23, 2007, FROM

According to the article, How to Successfully Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan on ameinfo.com, “most major organizations are running critical enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These applications are integrated across the enterprise to such an extent that they touch everyone from employees and customers to suppliers and partners, and they are the backbone and life-blood of the organization” (ameinfo.com, 2003). Implementing a good disaster recovery plan is highly imperative to ensure business continuity. However, one of the biggest challenges is convincing business leaders to recognize the need and fund the change. An organization should be prepared for all forms of disasters and catastrophes and have a disaster recovery plan in place that will allow the system should function normally under any of these circumstances. This alone will provide a huge competitive advantage and allow the organization to remain functional during potential down times. Natural or any other form of disaster is something that cannot be predicted and the company should be well prepared to deal with any untoward incidents. Any business utilizing IT systems should have proper backup and restoration methods to reset the system in case of emergencies.

Senior management concern in the development of plan helps in creating a more robust plan where every need is met in a more effective way. In case of any disaster recovery or business continuity plan, main focus is always to find a way through which business operations keep on the track. For this purpose, plan should include methods through which workers would interact with each other and carry out their routine

In the event of a disaster, the Damage Assessment/Salvage Team (reference Section 2.6.1) will evaluate the damage to the facility and hardware and functional capability of the Information Systems, and report its findings to the Executive Management Team (reference

The main objective of this business continuity planning is to overcome the aftermaths of disaster either man made or natural to initiate daily activities in a timely manner without interrupting in service. The main objectives of business continuity plan are as follows:

In this day and age, a business continuity plan is essential to an organizations risk management. A large organization like Sunshine Machine Works understand that time is critical when it comes to natural disasters or man made interruptions to their network systems. When a system is offline for excessive amounts of time, could mean a loss to the organization. That’s why having an effective business continuity plan is vital to keeping operations for being disturbed during a time of crisis whether it is an attack or natural disaster that could potentially affect Sunshine Machine Works operations, data and networks.

Disasters have become an inevitable part of businesses and organizations as well. They not only have a major effect on business and organizational continuity; they also result to an overhaul in organizational operational mechanisms (Awasthy, 2009). It is for this reason that many organizations and business resort to preparing business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans that will facilitate better disaster management in future. Effective disaster recovery plans are important to every business and organization (Thejendra, 2008).

As a consultant brought into an organization concerned about business continuity I would recommend to first perform a Risk Assessment Analysis and/or Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Conducting a business impact analysis will allow an organization to know the system or application’s downtime tolerance. The analysis will identify all systems and applications that can experience little to no downtime. Conducting risk assessment analysis will allow the organization to identify all the risks at the beginning and during the life of the organization, and grade the risks in terms of likelihood of occurring and seriousness of impact on the organization. Either analysis is an excellent tool and will result in the beginning creations of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. If using the BIA method a good first step is identifying the business’ most crucial systems and processes to assess what effect the outages will have on the business. All systems or applications should have a back-up location offsite to ensure business continuity. The higher the impact the more money a company should spend in order to quickly gain restoration of their business.