Disaster Recovery: Principles and Practices, by April Wells, Charlyne Walker, Timothy Walker, David Abarca

DISASTER RECOVERY: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
by April Wells, Charlyne Walker, Timothy Walker, David Abarca

With real world examples, this text provides an extensive introduction to disaster recovery
focusing on planning the team, planning for the disaster and practicing the plan to make sure
that, if ever needed, it will work.

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Keep your organization one step ahead of disaster.

Hurricanes, tsunamis, terrorism, wars and power outages make headlines every day. Is your
business or organization prepared to survive and carry on in the wake of any type of disaster -
natural or man-made?

DISASTER RECOVERY: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES provides a complete course in
developing a disaster recovery plan, including:
- Choosing a recovery team and defining the tasks and notification mechanisms they
will need to perform
- Assessing risks and prioritizing them based on their potential business impact.
- Prioritizing your organization’s functions and assets so they can be handled in a
systematic manner during recovery.
- A solution for data backup and storage that enables data to be recovered quickly and
efficiently.
- Creating appropriate service level agreements and developing sound organizational
structure so you can quickly recover and get back up and running again.
- How to practice implementing a disaster recovery plan, including testing its
effectiveness and preparing for implementation in an emergency setting.,
- Continued assessment of needs, threats and solutions.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO DISASTER RECOVERY
- Define disaster recovery.
- Defend the need for an organizational disaster recovery plan.
- Define “disaster” as it applies to a business or organization and outline the types of
disasters that might befall it.
- Describe how a disaster can affect an organization or business.
- Identify those threats that may be most relevant to an organization.
- Discuss specific threats to organizations.
- Explain the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity
plan.

CHAPTER 2: PREPARING TO DEVELOP THE DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN
- Choose the disaster recovery team.
- Define tasks that typically are assigned to the disaster recovery team.
- Describe the characteristics of disaster recovery team members.
- Create a notification directory.
- Understand what is involved in getting management support.
- Describe and understand the process involved in securing resources.
- Explain how to prepare your resources.

CHAPTER 3: ASSESSING RISK AND IMPACT
- Define the risks that may impact your organization.
- Investigate different risk assessments and business impact assessments.
- Set priorities for preventive measures and the recovery from any disaster situation.
- Choose a risk assessment method to be used to identify and quantify risk in an
organization.
- Perform risk assessments as they might pertain to an organization.
- Use tools such as OCTAVE to assist in risk assessment.

CHAPTER 4: PRIORITIZING SYSTEMS AND FUNCTIONS FOR RECOVERY
- Identify all assets and functions in the organization.
- Prioritize disaster recovery efforts based on assets and functions.
- Differentiate between tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 recovery targets to prioritize systems
that must be recovered in the event of a disaster.
- Determine dependencies between different data, functions, and assets.
- Distinguish between an inconvenient situation and a true disaster using disaster
declaration threshold criteria.

CHAPTER 5: IDENTIFY DATA STORAGE AND RECOVERY SITES
- Determine the best way or ways to back up your data so that it can be recovered
later.
- Evaluate your offsite storage options.
- Acknowledge information as well as hardware and software as an asset.
- Determine recovery site options.
- Examine recovery site types.
- Develop recovery site selection criteria.
- Outline a recovery solution.

CHAPTER 6: DEVELOPING PLANS, PROCEDURES, AND RELATIONSHIPS
- Determine what documents and contact information is necessary to support the
disaster recovery effort.
- Choose the tools necessary to support the disaster recovery effort.
- Determine the best way to direct the disaster recovery team.
- Choose a backup strategy that will allow you to meet your recovery objectives.
- Describe how upstream vendors can affect your organization’s ability to do work.
- Understand how your organization can affect downstream clients’ ability to do their
jobs.
- Describe how the organization’s SLAs impacts not only itself, but also its
downstream partners.
- Begin to pull together the recovery documentation.

CHAPTER 7: DEVELOPING PROCEDURES FOR SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES
- Identify emergency situations that may occur during a recovery.
- Determine what can be done if an emergency occurs during an emergency situation.
- Assess the risks associated with disaster recovery.
- Identify gaps in emergency recovery situations and plan accordingly.

CHAPTER 8: TESTING THE DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN
- Explain the necessity of practicing the DR plan.
- Describe the different kinds of tests that can be performed.
- Determine the impact of testing activities.
- Understand the need for change control.
- Describe methods of change control.

CHAPTER 9: CONTINUED ASSESSMENT OF NEEDS, THREATS, AND SOLUTIONS
- Determine the lessons that were learned during the test disaster recovery.
- Decide how to overcome the threats that were uncovered.
- Use SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis as an additional
method of determining threats.
- Plan for eliminating threats going forward.

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AUDIENCE

This book is intended for readers with a grasp of current trends in security and security risks,
particularly for organizations. An in-depth understanding of all security practices and methods
is not necessary, but an understanding of business practices and common business
processes is useful. Knowing what information is ‘out there’ is a critical first step in
determining what (and how) to protect it from intrusion. Obviously, the diversity of software
and hardware makes it difficult to offer specific solutions, but general knowledge of both is
also beneficial. For this same reason, this book is not written from an operating system
perspective. Only the smallest organizations usually have the luxury of having only a single
operating system.

DISASTER RECOVERY: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES is also a valuable resource for
business people and information technologists, as being assured that the business will
continue is one of their primary responsibilities.

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2007, 298 pages.
ISBN-10: 013171127X
ISBN-13: 978-0131711273
Order #DR812
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