A quick and simple disaster recovery policy

A quick disaster recovery policy boilerplate.

Customize it for your business, or leave it as-is.

The policy itself:

• • To minimize interruptions to the normal operations.
  • To limit the extent of disruption and damage.
  • To minimize the economic impact of the interruption.
  • To establish alternative means of operation in advance.
  • To train personnel with emergency procedures.
  • To provide for smooth and rapid restoration of service.

1. Policy Initiation
   1. Notify senior management
   2. Contact and set up disaster recovery team
   3. Set a disaster recovery team primary point of contact and incident center of command
   4. Determine degree of disaster
   5. Determine response first steps
   6. Determine estimated time to recovery complete
   7. Update senior management on initial findings
   8. Select appropriate disaster recovery procedure based on degree of disaster

2. Policy Response
   1. Notify users of the disruption of service
   2. Implement proper application recovery procedure dependent on extent of disaster
   3. Monitor progress on recovery policy implementation through DR recovery team primary point of contact
   4. Contact backup site and establish a point of contact at that location
   5. Contact all other necessary personnel–both user and data processing–required for success of the recovery policy
   6. Contact vendors–both hardware and software–related to the disasters affected equipment

3. Recover from disaster
   1. Determine applications to be run and in what sequence
   2. Ensure that all personnel involved know their tasks
   3. Make sure that the DR team at the disaster site has the necessary information to begin restoring
   4. Recover affected equipment from disk or tape media
   5. Verify recovered equipment is functioning properly
   6. Begin normal operations and notify staff of completion of recovery
   7. Review disaster process and document good/bad sections of the procedure