With recovery plans, you document the measures to restore IT systems in chronological order. These plans show the correct order for switching off and on entire server rooms and data centers. In Docusnap A document template is available to you for creating a recovery plan. This can be found under IT concepts if you want to create a new document.
You cannot know which people will have to restore your IT systems or restart your entire server room in an emergency. Perhaps this activity will have to be carried out by an external company. Or an IT employee who has not yet gained any experience with it is appointed to do so. What is needed now are detailed descriptions and step-by-step instructions. Which IT system must be started when, which dependencies must be checked, which data may need to be restored and from which media. And the crucial question: Where are the passwords?
Use not only in an emergency
You can distinguish between two system states to apply your recovery plans:
- Restart in normal operation
- Restart in emergency mode
It is therefore not always necessary for an emergency to occur first before a recovery plan can be applied. In which situation emergency operations may be called is described in the IT Emergency Handbook. Hopefully you'll never have to do this. However, the restart in normal operation is something that can in principle happen every day. Examples include hardware defects and maintenance work on electrical systems or air-conditioning technology. In an emergency, however, a simple restart may not be enough. Depending on the situation, the hardware must also be purchased first. However, you describe all of this in the emergency plan. In such cases, the recovery plan is more likely to become a recovery plan. If you want to make this distinction within your company. Thematically, a recovery plan is, of course, more extensive. However, you can also depict it in a different way. When you think in terms of process flows, add the decision “Hardware available? “with the ways yes and no one. Problem solved!
Include technical infrastructure in the recovery plan
Create your recovery plans directly in Docusnap. Don't forget to consider the technical infrastructure. This is because air-conditioning technology and energy supply must be available and run stably, otherwise the next disaster is imminent due to overheating or a power failure. Then you can start from scratch. Unfortunately, such infrastructure cannot be inventoried via the network, but must be created manually with the IT assets. Enrich plans with IT system inventory data. Make sure that all documentation is available even in an emergency. Because that's when you need your complete IT documentation.
The best plans are of course of no use if they are not continuously verified. As part of emergency preparedness, you must ensure that the processes are carried out in accordance with the recovery plan. Now, of course, you cannot carry out an emergency exercise with all system restores including upstream emergency recovery. The following points should therefore be reviewed continuously. Note the audit as a measure in emergency preparedness, as that is part of it.
- Does data backup work? Is the data backup concept being implemented correctly?
- Practice continuously restoring business-critical data to test systems
- Can your suppliers provide the hardware within the guaranteed time frame? Depending on the criticality of the recovery, perhaps written agreements should be made?
- Is the space required to (temporarily) install the hardware available? Take air conditioning, energy supply, space requirements and accessibility into account! Is the installation site sufficiently secured against access?
- Are any phone numbers listed still up to date? Check them at least on a random basis. Are there special emergency numbers for tradesmen and suppliers.
- Paper printouts update service
