Disaster Recovery Plan

Definition OF Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) can be defined as “Set of documents, instructions & procedures which enable a business to respond to accidents, disasters, emergencies, and/or threats without any stoppage or hindrance in its key operations. DRP is also known as business resumption plan, business continuity plan, or recovery plan.”

(businessdictionary.com, 2011)

Explanation

A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is deal with potential disasters that when it occurs how they can recover the data or information necessary for the continuity of the business. It is a plan consist of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized & the organization will be able to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions. It involves the analysis of business processes & continuity needs, it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention.

Disaster recovery is becoming an increasingly important aspect of enterprise computing. As devices, systems & networks become ever more complex, there are simply more things that can go wrong. The disaster Recovery plan includes the industry standards, best practices and international standards like hardware, redundancy, clustering, replication and data reduplication, availability, reliability, & extensibility. Some of the examples of disasters are fire, earthquakes, and many more.

(oucs.ox.ac.uk, 2011)

Example

An example of disaster recovery plan, fifteen or twenty years ago if there was a threat to systems from a fire, a disaster recovery plan might consist of powering down the mainframe & other computers before the sprinkler system came on, disassembling components, and subsequently drying circuit boards in the parking lot with a hair dryer. Current enterprise systems tend to be too large & complicated for such simple and hands-on approaches, however, and interruption of service or loss of data can have serious financial impact, whether directly or through loss of customer confidence.

(SOLUTION) What If ‘DRP’ occurs?

Disasters can or cannot be controlled depending on the condition of the disaster. But if the company have the recovery plan like they already backup the necessary data & kept in the safe place. It will be easy for them to recover the information after the disaster. Also the responsibility of the employees is the main criteria for an organization that they should implement the correct recovery plan but before that the senior employees or CEO or board of directors of the company should appoint the correct or experience staff to make a best plan for the organization and then train the junior employees to implement it.

Provisioned Disaster Recovery Servers

The Brief Explanation of Hot site, Cold site, & Warm site are given below. According to Haag, Cummings, McCubbrey, Pinsonneult, and Donovan. (2004).

Cold Sites

“A cold site is the most inexpensive type of backup site for an organization to operate. It does not include backed up copies of data and information from the original location of the organization, nor does it include hardware already set up. The lack of hardware contributes to the minimal startup costs of the cold site, but requires additional time following the disaster to have the operation running at a capacity close to that prior to the disaster.” ¹

Hot Sites

“A hot site is a duplicate of the original site of the organization, with full computer systems as well as near-complete backups of user data. Real time synchronization between the two sites may be used to completely mirror the data environment of the original site using wide area network links and specialized software. Following a disruption to the original site, the hot site exists so that the organization can relocate with minimal losses to normal operations. Ideally, a hot site will be up and running within a matter of hours or even less. Personnel may still have to be moved to the hot site so it is possible that the hot site may be operational from a data processing perspective before staff has relocated. The capacity of the hot site may or may not match the capacity of the original site depending on the organization's requirements. This type of backup site is the most expensive to operate. Hot sites are popular with organizations that operate real time processes such as financial institutions, government agencies and e commerce providers” ¹

Warm Sites

“A warm site is, quite logically, a compromise between hot and cold. These sites will have hardware and connectivity already established, though on a smaller scale than the original production site or even a hot site. Warm sites will have backups on hand, but they may not be complete and may be between several days and a week old. An example would be backup tapes sent to the warm site by courier.” ¹

REFERENCES

Avaialable at (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-continuity-plan.html) Accessed at 21/06/2011

Avaialable at (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/groupware/docs/GroupwareProjectSpecificationv1pt1.pdf) Accessd at 21/06/2011

¹Haag, Cummings, McCubbrey, Pinsonneult, and Donovan. (2004). Information Management Systems, For The Information Age. McGraw-Hill Ryerson.