Corporate Policy – Foundation Stone for Disaster Recovery (Part 2)

Knowing what is driving your DR plan helps you to be grounded in reality and take a pragmatic approach that fulfills the desires of the sponsoring bodies. Without this grounding you could embark on a quixotic quest to provide far more than the sponsors ever envisaged with consequent shock and awe as you present your first budget request. Alternatively, you might embark on a minimum effort in an earnest but misguided attempt to constrain cost and optimize time to deliver, only to find that the very basic approach you have undertaken will not meet the needs envisaged by the sponsors for a demonstrable recovery to full production.

What should be in a corporate policy on DR? While the actual policy wording will be highly situational and reflective of your own particular culture there are several key components you will want to include. These include the DR plan’s objectives, drivers, assumptions and responsibilities.

Set up preliminary discussions, seek ideas from each executive, offer draft statements. This will demonstrate your ability to seek executive guidance while capturing key drivers, needs, and assumptions for the policy development. Gain additional participation in the drafting of this policy by having discussion sessions one level down with key managers. Offer as a basis for the discussions potential “bullet points” or “draft phrases” for each component of the policy. Typically, at some point in the creative process, the executive team will adopt the policy development, take ownership, refine and publish the policy

Now you have the “legal” foundation for your project and a clear and compelling statement of objectives and the drivers behind the objectives for a significant corporate investment and effort. But the job is not yet done. Now you need to make sure that everyone knows about this. Executives may fail to communicate this policy effectively unless prompted, and you will need to follow up and help the various parties understand the implications of this policy, the drivers behind it, and how this will impact each of them and their role in either infrastructure support or application usage as the DR plan is developed.

- Dick Benton, GlassHouse Principal Consultant

Related posts:

1. Thinking about Disaster Recovery There are many platforms and requirement metrics to consider when...
2. The business impact analysis provides an empirical basis on which to determine business aligned recovery services and their attributes – Part 1 In previous blogs we covered the identification of policies...
3. Data Deduplication, Backup, Disaster Recovery, Archive, and Tape Elimination in 500 Words or Less:(part 4 of 5) Tape Elimination (VTL and encryption) Many of our customers are...

Related posts brought to you by Amazon plugin.