Disaster Recovery – Approaching the Process for Organization Stability

• Addressing the changing technology landscape and it's affects on Disaster planning and continuity
• Understanding (BCM) Business Continuity Management, the roles for each member
• Understanding the cascading affects on infrastructure, access, reputation and finances
• Understanding the areas to encompass in a full disaster recovery plan
• Priorities in disaster recovery planning

Lesson Two - Defining the 'Disaster"

• Rationalizing what is a disaster versus a setback
• Classifying disasters, ranking their impact
• Preplanning for disaster contingencies when technology or ideologies change

Lesson Three - The Importance of Documentation

• What documentation is required to build a solid disaster recovery solution
• Keeping up with organizational policies and procedures and their importance to disaster continuities
• Maintaining appropriate documentation and processes with the 'ever-green' nature of new technologies
• Establishing a documentation workflow and records retention narrative

Lesson Four - Addressing Virtualization and Cloud Computing

• The importance of well-versed staff in identifying potential losses when virtualization is used
• Verifying data loss/ service loss of virtualization disasters
• The critical nature of cloud-based data protection elements and licensing
• Evaluating the cost of vendor data loss protection/service protection features, versus the cost of self-insured protection

Lesson Five - Business Continuity Management

• Identifying the stakeholders to the Business Continuity plan
• Creating a Disaster recovery map/plan
• Understanding ISO when creating the plan
• Risk Analysis given the existing environment and the existing plan for recovery
• Analyzing the importance of continuity to stakeholders, other services, other organizations as well as to the organization as a whole

Lesson Six – Incident Response

• Based upon BCM, identify and act upon the incident
• Delegating and creating a responsive team
• Analyzing the incident and identifying all affected processes/systems/services
• Documentation flow from report, to summary to change management updating
• Using Incident reports to build new testing models and process

Lesson Seven – Legalities

• Identifying all organizational policies that were not sufficient to prevent or reduce the impact of the disaster/occurrence
• Identifying and analyzing legal requirements for reporting the disaster
• Identifying and analyzing legal requirements for the impact to the systems

Lesson Eight - Incident Response; being Proactive against the next disaster

• Understanding that incident response and disaster recovery must be fully documented and reviewed
• Creating contingency plans based on previous incidents
• Selecting and creating the best (IMT) Incident Management Team
• Selecting, creating and maintaining the best (IRT) Incident Response Team
• The importance of testing and training

Lesson Nine – Creating the Documentation

• Choosing the best format for the disaster response
• Creating the workflow that will report, analyse, evaluate impact and result in procedural enhancements
• Notifying stakeholders and those impacted of the recovery
• Maintaining the documentation for long term records retention and for future referrals