DRP Awareness Training - Always a Good Idea
The planning process for developing a data center disaster recovery plan is often viewed as a daunting task. Much of the time the people who start the project - or new people added to assist - lack a good overview of the development components and process. This leads to frustration, incomplete data collection, and missed deadlines.
A frequent question is simply “Where do we start?” The reality is that DRP documents don’t contain any mysterious or secret information. What they do contain is a lot of information which takes time to find, validate, and put in the desired plan format. Providing an overview of the process greatly reduces the questions and issues in developing the document.
A proven method to address these concerns is often a simple solution: provide some plan development awareness training up front. This generally covers a logical sequence of activities along with samples of what the end product in each step should look like.
The content of good awareness training materials includes disaster definitions, a business loss (BIA) overview, list of planning requirements (hardware, software, communications, application lists, offsite storage analysis, recovery options, a maintenance and testing approach, etc), and a general discussion of how all the pieces fit together as an end product.
When this type of awareness training is provided at the start of the project it makes a significant impact on both the participation of those involved and the quality of the end product.
Unfortunately, this training is frequently omitted, which is definitely not a good step on which to begin. The recommended approach is to provide overview slides (frequently done in PowerPoint) and to conduct the session, which often only takes a few hours, along with people in the room who can answer questions. If these types of training materials are not available there are some good sources to find them on the www.rothstein.com web site. For example, training slides (20+) are a part of each of the GO.RECOVER product template.
=========================================================
======================================
Jan Persson is the author of the GO.RECOVER-Data Center Disaster Recovery Template - a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for under $100. It includes a specific procedure to audit if all data is backed up and a checklist for offsite storage locations.
