Does your company need a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Maybe it’s time to think about Integrative Disaster Recovery (IDR)!

Over the last three years Origina assisted many customers in real disaster recovery situations or during their regular disaster recovery tests. In almost all cases we found that disaster recovery processes and procedures had been developed and a disaster recovery plan was in place. However, the DR team was often not able to perform the recovery tasks as expected. Also the change management of the disaster recovery plan was inadequate in many cases. From these reasons a new, unique concept has been developed by Origina, called Integrative Disaster Recovery Planning (IDR).

What is the new approach in the IDR concept?

Disaster Occurrence and Recovery Process will be considered as a multifactorial determined process. IDR extends the conventional DR concepts by:

• The inclusion of the human factor
• The inclusion of organizational factors
• Adding the building block “IDR development”

IDR is focused on optimisation of DR processes and procedures. The system character in disaster occurrence and recovery is mirrored in the IDR concept and building blocks which means the DR preparedness of the IT environment will be examined focused on:

• Key systems and dependencies
• Definition of Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for relevant applications
• Existing backup systems
• Secondary data centre

Together and on a par with:

• The Disaster related organisational structure
• Responsibilities and access to all relevant information in disaster cases
• Necessary and applicable IT skills of the DR staff members
• Incident communication
• Team communication and organisation of the DR team
• Quality of disaster management

The IDR concept enables through the new building block “IDR Development” the optimisation of technical procedures in relation to employee skills, team- and organisational processes beyond conventional concepts. The concept of IDR Development includes not only training of technical recovery processes it comprises also practice of disaster recovery teams and the appropriate organization. Enhancing problem solving skills in DR teams is the core concept of IDR Development.

Disaster Recovery is always a very complex process and will need to carried out under strong pressure (time, risk of data loss …). Integrative Disaster Recovery Planning covers for the first time all components involved in this process: IT infrastructure, processes, procedures and the Disaster Recovery team and enables a new quality of DR planning and DR preparation.