A comprehensive disaster recovery plan is essential if you want your organization to stay operational during emergencies. Stay In Business’ suite of disaster recovery planning templates makes it easy for you to develop detailed procedures that keep your business safe and invulnerable to danger.

Statistics show that 35% of businesses without DR plans never recover from a major catastrophe!!

• Is your business protected?
• Are your critical suppliers protected?
• Without a plan you are vulnerable!!

Over 33,000 businesses have used the disaster recovery planning template offered on our website, DisasterRecovery.org. And its new and improved version makes it easier than ever to develop detailed and logically structured plans with existing resources.

• Cost effective – Save thousands of dollars in downtime with our disaster recovery planning template.
• Easy to Use – Now you can develop a disaster recovery plan with minimal effort and time.
• Customize – Customize the solution to suit your resiliency objectives.
• Also included in the disaster recovery planning template are the following sections:
  • Personnel– Maintain a detailed and updated contacts database of all your personnel.
  • Applications profile – Maintain a complete list of all applications used by the organization along with related details such as number of hours used on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, manufacturer details, mission critical assets, processes, equipment and so on.
  • Inventory – Keep track of all company equipment and appliances.
  • Information services backup procedures – This section of the disaster recovery planning template lets you maintain logs of all backup procedures to be performed.
  • Disaster recovery procedures – You can draft your company’s activities after a disaster along with a checklist for plan initiation. These activities include:
    • Emergency Response Procedures (ERP)
    • Backup Operations Procedures (BOP)
    • Recovery Actions Procedures (RAP) following a disaster
  • Recovery plan mobile site – You can document all details pertaining to your mobile site in this section including arrangements for power, transport, connectivity, equipment and other essential supplies.
  • Recovery plan hot site– Your disaster recovery plan can include all hot site procedures, such as:
    • Establishing communications
    • Loading systems from the saved tapes
    • Restoring normal operations
    • Maintaining hot site configurations and so on
  • Restoring all systems– Describes the procedures for restoring all systems after a disaster that causes a complete outage across all infrastructure.
  • Rebuilding process– Here you can detail the procedures for taking stock of all the damage done and rebuilding a new data center based on factors such as (i) the projected availability of all required resources, (ii) approximate time required for repair work, (iii) feasibility of purchasing new equipment and (iv) availability of alternate locations.
  • Testing DR plan – The disaster recovery planning template lets you document your disaster recovery plan’s testing procedures in this section along with all the changes and modifications that are frequently incorporated into the plans. The particulars of this section include (i) Scope (ii) Objectives (iii) Process for obtaining management approval and (iv) Improving the plan based on test findings.
  • Disaster site rebuilding– Manage rebuilding the disaster site from here, including details such as the floor plan, power and network requirements, safety and security installations and so on.
  • Infectious and communicable diseases plan – The disaster recovery planning template also lets you respond to unforeseen catastrophes such as epidemics and risks that travelling employees are exposed to. This section takes you through all important considerations for developing a plan.
  • DR Plan for data breach – Cyber crimes, network intrusions and vulnerabilities are a major concern for any business that depends heavily on its IT infrastructure. In this section, you can detail how your organization plans to safeguard processes that involve mirrored networks, remote backup, replication and other entities that are vulnerable to data breaches.
  • Record of changes – Keep track of all changes made to your DR plans

DR Plan Template

A DR plan template provides a working framework to create disaster recovery plans for different risk scenarios. Templates for disaster recovery planning have a flexible design so they can be easily adapted to create responses for different risks. While some features might be common across all plans, others might become relevant only in the case of specific scenarios. For instance, not all employees or personnel need to be notified when a specific component in the IT infrastructure such as a server or a database goes down. On the other hand, all plans will have a system in place for maintaining version controls.

Plan Segregation

The crisis response capability for the entire IT infrastructure is first broken down into segments for specific components such as:

Teams for

• Disaster Recovery
• Disaster Management
• Crisis Communication/Notification
• Network
• Applications
• Data & Backups
• Hardware & Equipment
• Testing & Maintenance

Personnel with the necessary skills are assigned to each of these teams with corresponding roles, responsibilities and contact information. There is also provision in the DR plan template for a master list where the contact information of all employees can be maintained separately. Similarly, separate databases collate and maintain inventory for all company assets and resources.

The structural composition of a DR plan template depends on the type of business operations your company undertakes. For instance, the DR plan template for a small business would be very different from that of a multinational conglomerate. It is important to choose one that matches the nature, scale and complexity of your organization’s business operations.

Business Continuity Planning Template

Business continuity planning templates lets your organization ensure that processes are resilient enough to withstand the impact of disruptions and continue operating. It provides a structure for incorporating industry recognized guidelines while protecting individuals, information and assets.

Roles & responsibilities are delegated to individuals and teams. Multiple activities are deployed, coordinated and streamlined in order to seamlessly transition an emergency incident.

Testing

Ensuring your business remains operational is a challenging ordeal. Your business continuity planning template must make room for enterprise wide testing procedures that are conducted at least once a year.

Developing a Strategy for Failover

Staying in business implies staying prepared for typical risks that can expose vulnerabilities in your operational landscape. So, you must use the business continuity planning template to incorporate findings from the hazard identification and risk assessment exercises into plans.

Prioritizing Continuity for Mission Critical Tasks

The business impact analysis (BIA) lets organizations identify mission critical processes – processes that are most crucial to business – based on their impact on commerce and revenue.

RTO and RPO

The business continuity planning template lets you develop plans for making systems, applications and processes available within the RTO and RPO objectives defined as per your company’s policy.

Team Organization

The business continuity planning template lets you manage different teams that collectively work towards restoring a ‘business as usual’ status. These include teams for:

• Executive management
  • Evaluate impacts on stakeholders and the entire corporation
  • Define executive support and strategies
  • Provide cursory guidance to the situation management team on strategy
  • Take decisions on external communications
  • Grant approvals for resource, utility and other requirements
• Situation management
  • Intermediary between executive group and other teams
  • Facilitate guidance, resource and support
  • Establish objectives and priorities
  • Liaise with official agencies in the locality
  • Manage incident response tasks
• Employee disaster assistance
  • Address staff concerns
  • Work as part of the situation management team during a crisis
• Functional area recovery management (FARM)
  • Attend to all tasks pertaining to their area of focus. This could include:
    • Applications support
    • Database or system administration
    • Network engineering
    • Information security
    • Telecommunications, supplies and insurance
  • Implement instructions received from the situation management team
• Field Business Continuity
  • Continuity issues on the field
  • Safeguarding employees and resources
  • Remote site incident management
  • Merging field tasks with the company’s consolidated response framework

Developing business continuity plans for an organization with numerous teams, departments and divisions can be daunting task and can go terribly wrong if not handled methodically. A business continuity planning template provides a working blueprint upon with enterprises can build a resilient business model that lets them stay safe and in business.