The primary goal of this guide is not simply to provide a checklist of tasks, but to help you develop an understanding of the disaster recovery (DR) planning process and the principles that underlie it. Before getting into the details, let’s consider first just what this guide will do for you and equally importantly, what it will not do.

What this guide will do is to lay out a framework for your company’s DR planning that keeps things conceptually simple and helps you know what steps must be carried out and why, without a lot of jargon or unnecessary formality. The framework we’ll use is equally relevant to disaster recovery planning for a division of a large multi-national corporation and for an operation involving a dozen people in a small office. Of course the scales of the tasks involved in these two cases differ rather drastically.

The focus here will be a practical one. Good disaster recovery planning is about identifying those processes and resources that are truly critical, developing realistic recovery objectives for them and then developing a plan that can achieve those objectives as simply and cost-effectively as possible.

We will also focus on making the planning process doable, even if this sacrifices some sophistication. The reality is that a sophisticated DR plan that is too complex or expensive to properly maintain and test is worse than a plan that only does the minimum because it gives a false sense of security. So, this guide is intended to help you negotiate the decisions that you’ll need to make in order to develop an effective, executable plan that allows your organization to recover critical processes in order to function after a disaster.

Now to what this guide will not do.

First, it will not make you an expert on disaster recovery planning. Nothing but experience and observation can do that. It may well be that you need to hire outside expertise in order to develop a plan of the scale required by your organisation. This guide can still be of value to you since it will help you more effectively participate in the planning process and to understand and evaluate what the outside experts are doing.

Also, it will not teach you about all the different software, hardware and service solutions available as components in a disaster recovery plan. Certainly we will present some general information on the kinds of options available and the trade-offs involved, but the field has many different options and continues to evolve rapidly. There is no substitute for research on the latest offerings that are relevant to your needs and direct discussion with the vendors involved.

Above all, this guide will not make disaster recovery planning “easy.” The complexity of the planning at the very least mirrors the complexity of the processes that must be recovered, and the best planning guide in the world cannot change that. Nevertheless, preparing a plan is not easy, the procedures described here will aid significantly in navigating the difficulties and keeping the complexity under control.

Click here to download the DRP Guide