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In the disaster plans I have written, we tended to focus on symptoms (and,
specifically, our intended reaction to them) rather than causes. That is,
it doesn't matter if it is the plague, a flood, or a really great Seinfeld
rerun that keeps 75% of the staff at home. What does matter is how you
organize the 25% you have, how you structure your first-line contingencies,
etc. So your categories end up being things like: 75% work force out;
Building #1 unenterable; or Computer network offline. Once you have them in
these types of categories, you can write branching procedures that do take
causes into account somewhat (if the building will never again be
enterable, go to page 2, if it will, go to page 4, etc.). Your idea of
grouping them sounds right for organizational purposes. As you know, people
who follow these (it's probably happened sometime...) need to be able to
find their situation quickly and then perform the procedures sometimes
under extreme duress.
It all depends, of course, on your company's configuration (physical and
organizational). I think the first thing to do is figure the relative
probabilities of disasters, then the order of severity of disasters, then
matrix the two lists to get you started (working on the most common and
very severe ones first).
One problem area is when more than one of your disasters happen
simultaneously. Sometimes you can plan for this, other times not.
my $.02
Kurt Hebner
Decisionism Inc
Boulder CO
khebner -at- decisionism -dot- com
-----Original Message-----
From: Mary Kunzweiler [SMTP:Mary -dot- Kunzweiler -at- DELUXE -dot- COM]
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 1998 1:40 PM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Disaster recovery plan
Hi,
I need to document a corporate-wide disaster recovery plan.
Does anybody know the types of info covered in such a plan? I know I need
to
cover topics like "Tornado wipes out manufacturing plants, here's our
plan",
"Bubonic plague keeps 3/4 work force at home, here's our plan" and "UPS
goes on
strike, here's our plan." Do I lump disasters under major categories, such
as
"Natural disaster recovery" "Personnel disaster recovery" "Vendor disaster
recovery" etc.? What categories am I missing?
Does anybody have templates or example plans they'd be willing to share (in
MSWord)?
Do URLs to web sites that discuss disaster recovery plans exist? If so,
what
are these URLs?
Thanks,
Mary
