Re: disaster recovery plan

[bmaaks -at- TELLABS -dot- COM]

Mary et al.,

A disaster recovery plan documents how to recover the business data
(and operations) after a disaster, no matter which type of disaster.
Comdisco was a company that specialized in this area: they had computer
centers for staging a recovery, plus the facilities to store data
as part of a company's recovery plan. They did it from soup to nuts.

In a recovery plan, the company will look for "protected" off-site
locations for storing backups and archives, possibly rotating locations.
For example, one company I worked for as a consultant used an underground
bank vault for storing its data tapes.

So the idea is to identify the company's essential data, without which
it cannot continue operations if the central location were wiped out.
This essential data needs to be stored in one or more locations, in a
somewhat secured manner, and then UPDATED regularly so the most current
data is available. No use storing archives from last year and losing all
data from the current year. Therefore, the recovery plan identifies the
essential data, its form and source; how frequently the most current
data is transported to these locations; who and how the data would be
recovered, and business operations would continue, if the central location
(home office) were to go up in smoke.

I hope this helps,

Betsy Maaks
bmaaks -at- tellabs -dot- com

I speak for the author, not the company.