IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Writing the Disaster Recovery Plan

The job isn't done until the paperwork's done.

Nowhere is this pithy saying truer than in disaster recovery planning. The paperwork in DR planning outlines how to jump-start the business when the big one hits. Depending on where your business is located, the big one may be an earthquake, labor strike, hurricane, flood, or a swarm of locusts.

The paperwork for DR planning simply covers the procedures and other documents that business personnel must refer to in order to get things going again after a disaster. The DR planning procedures are especially important because people who aren't the foremost experts on the systems that support critical business processes may have to read and follow those procedures. Those people have to rebuild critical systems in a short period of time so those systems can support critical processes. And the people performing those processes probably aren't subject matter experts at the business process level.

The business's survival depends on the paperwork being right. You don't get any second chances.

In this chapter, I explain how to actually write down the DR plan.

You just love documentation, right? Thought so.

Determining Plan Contents

Before embarking on the task of actually writing the DR plan, the team needs to agree what the DR plan is. You can describe it something like this:

The disaster recovery plan is the set of documents that describes post-disaster emergency response, damage assessment, and system restart ...