Simplfy Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan Maintenance
There is an old saying among some DRP/BCP consultants: “Having a DRP that is out of date is worse than having no plan at all. That is because people think you have a plan but you really don’t.”
Over the years of auditing hundreds of plans, what frequently happens is as follows:
Question: Can I speak with this person. Answer: This person is no longer here.
Question: Do you have good procedures for the iSeries? Answer: We don’t have that platform anymore.
Question: Does your off-site storage vendor pick up every day? Answer: Oh, we changed vendors. They come once a week now to save money.
A plan that is not maintained falls into disarray quickly. What then is the value of such a plan in the event it is needed? The answer is “minimal”. Much time will be spent trying to update the information in the plan as the recovery proceeds. Talk about a disaster.
Frequently, once a plan is deemed “done” it sits on a shelf for a year or more without being updated (a/k/a maintained). Then, also frequently, the task of updating falls on a person who is told: “Here is the plan, please update it.” A daunting task indeed.
Why not simplify the maintenance process? Instead of updating the entire plan document (frequently hundreds of pages long) as one task, why not break it up into pieces? After all, not everything changes that much. The concept is simply to identify a maintenance schedule (a/k/a maintenance driver) which selects those groups of plan elements that need to be reviewed frequently (quarterly), those that need a less frequent look (every 6 months) and those that really only need a review once a year (annually). Take the list and format a table or spreadsheet and assign each of the plan elements to a specific person. Then cycle out the maintenance tasks on the schedule and update the document with new information as you go.
For example:
- Quarterly review: Personnel contact information (phone numbers), etc.
- Every 6 months: Application list, vendor list, etc.
- Annual: Assumptions, recovery strategy, etc.
This breaks the maintenance task up into small, manageable pieces and puts some logic to the review cycle. For example, don’t ask people to review plan elements every quarter if the elements only change about once a year.
Most plan development software products include a maintenance process or procedure. At least they should. One such product is GO.RECOVER DATA CENTER. The product includes a maintenance process description and a pre-formatted maintenance table.
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Jan Persson is the author of the GO.RECOVER-Data Center Disaster Recovery Template – a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for under $100.
