Definition of Disaster Recovery
What You Really Need To Know

The definition of disaster recovery is that it is really the process, policies and procedures involved in preparing for recovery of the IT infrastructure for your organization, in case of a major disruption.

It's also important to define disaster recovery as a subset of your company's total business continuity plans.

Now, we all know of natural disasters such as flooding, fire, hurricane, earthquake, which are difficult to deal with, and you can take precautions to avoid and minimize losses.

There are also "man-made" disasters that can be major failures, such as human error, sabotage, theft, walkouts, and intentional intrusions throughout your network, routers, modems, PCs and servers.

Many of these are more commonly known as security holes for which there are tools to diagnose and prevent them from re-occurring. They still help us in our definition of disaster recovery.

A Real Life Example

Some may not consider the story to follow a true "disaster" but it's part of the definition of disaster recovery and it serves to show you an example:

• Of a business risk that you must be prepared for,
• Where you must be certain you have adequate backups,
• Of accessing an off-site facility,
• Scheduling access to computer time, and
• Stopping all normal daily accounting production updates for a week.

An error occurred in one of the nightly accounting processing of a batch of data. It wasn't caught in the next day's reports, nor was it caught at the end of the month.

It was only uncovered mid way through the next month's transaction processing. The finance department could not simply prepare reversing entries to clear the incorrect information.

The finance department made the decision that the best solution was to:

1. Restore the accounting and financial statement database to the opening of the previous month.
2. Then roll forward each day's transactions day by day till they arrived at the problem day.
3. Make sure it was processed correctly.
4. Then continue rolling forward day by day till month end.
5. Run the month end processing again producing a new set of financial statements.
6. Then roll forward to the current day.

This whole recovery process required:

• A full week of special production run on an off-site computer,
• Overtime for the computer operations department.
• Accounting staff to verify and confirm each rerun of the daily transactions to ensure the books were correct.
• Then catching up with the current week's transactions, which were delayed.

Fortunately this company had an IT manager who had established proper backup procedures that would make this recovery possible. And help in our definition of disaster recovery.

The backup procedures were in place based on discussions with each of the business units within the organization on the types of events that could possibly occur and then what backups were required to minimize that potential risk.

Useful Disaster Recovery Resources

1. Disaster Recovery World

At Disaster Recovery World, you'll find some of these tools:

• Business impact and risk analysis.
• Creating a disaster recovery plan.
• Disaster recovery training.
• Service level agreements.
• Contingency audit and plan assurance.
• Disaster recovery services and resources.

It's a resource designed to help you whether you're new to developing disaster recovery plans or you've been doing them for years. And it offers good information toward a definition of disaster recovery.

2. Disaster Recovery Guide

The Disaster Recovery Guide is intended for those of you who are looking for help in the business continuity planning process. There are two major sections:

1. Disaster Recovery Basics
   • Getting started the right way.
   • Why you need to be planning.
   • Making disaster recovery a policy.
   • Conducting business impact and risk analysis.
   • The actual disaster recovery plan.
   • Reviewing your contingency plans.
   • The all important process of making Backups.
   • Maintaining your plans.
2. Service Level Agreements

3. Continuity Central

Continuity Central is useful because it has been structured to provide access to lists of articles, white papers and links for business continuity and disaster recovery. For example you can:

• Select a category such as information, or
• Select a region for the part of the world in which you reside, or
• Select from a host of specific topics on business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR), or
• Select a business/industry sector that matches your industry such as healthcare, financial, manufacturing, etc., or
• Select from basic or advanced resources within BC or DR, or
• Access newsletters, discussion groups, courses and events.

Disaster Recovery Plan Example

Would you like to learn more about the components of a disaster recovery plan? Get closer to a definition of disaster recovery? What are some of the risks and how you should prepare to deal with them?

Learn more at our disaster recovery plan example page.

How To Get Additional Help

The bottom line is that if you're new to disaster recovery, your best bet is to hire an IT disaster recovery plan consultant. In fact, you really can't afford not to do so. We can help you get there.

Our offer of professional help is a serious one. First of all, you'll find that while the site information is exhaustive, it appears in a brief, easy-to-read, often bulleted, executive style.

You won't get bogged down in details while browsing this site, but we DO have extensive in-depth information for you if you want or need it. It's free and all you have to do is ask!

Start right now by going to the Contact Us page and completing the simple online form. You'll receive immediate access to two authoritative industry books, which our site sponsor will mail to you at no cost.

As a thank you for participating in our site, you'll also receive a bonus download of "15 Interview Questions To Ask IT Outsourcing Providers".

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