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September 2005
    

Home Safe: Effective Disaster Planning  


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Disaster Recovery Teams

When training your IT department to avoid the effects of a potential disaster, one critical component to consider is the need to create recovery teams. Recovery teams should include the people who know their areas best, disregarding ego, but with regard for an appropriately swift recovery from the disaster. Different organizations may require more or less than the 12 recovery teams suggested below.

At the very least, team leaders for each group must be identified, and management as well as the selected individuals must agree to the selections. Once the team leaders are in place, the rest of the teams must be staffed. It is generally considered bad practice for any individual to be part of more than one recovery team.

The 12 suggested recovery teams:

 

          1. Disaster Management Team: This group oversees and coordinates the entire recovery effort. The recovery coordinator will likely head this team, which should be staffed by representatives from all key business and operations departments in the company. During a recovery, and on a regular basis, all of the other recovery teams will report to this team.
           
          1. Communications Team: This group includes representatives from the public relations group, if applicable, and is responsible for all communications with executive and upper management, media, emergency services, the employees and their families, and any other organizations that wish to speak with yours. Any communication requests that come in to other parts of the company must be redirected to this team.


          1. Computer Recovery Team: This group works to restore all of the computer-related functions in an organization following a disaster. If multiple teams are necessary, these teams will work very closely together throughout the recovery to ensure that all systems, networks, storage, applications, and data are properly restored.
           
          1. System Recovery Team: This group will be broken into several sub-teams, one for each system platform found across the organization. A typical organization might have a Windows team, a Solaris team, an HP-UX team, and a mainframe team. There should be a single leader to whom all system recovery teams report. This team's goal is to get all critical systems back online following a disaster.


          1. Network Recovery Team: This group is responsible for getting the LANs and WANs, and all of the associated equipment (routers, switches, hubs, etc.) back online at the recovery site.


          1. Storage Recovery Team: This group is responsible for restoring the SAN to service (if one exists), and to make sure that all disk and tape drives are accessible by their systems after the system recovery team has completed its job.


          1. Applications Recovery Team: This group comes into play once the system and storage teams have completed their tasks. The application team takes over and works to get databases and other applications back online.


          1. Data Management Team: This group is responsible for getting data restored to the systems where it is needed, and for physically managing backup tapes. They are responsible for making sure that the tapes make it to the recovery site following a disaster.


          1. Vendor Contact Team: This group is responsible for contacting all of the enterprise's vendors and maintaining that contact as necessary throughout the recovery period. All requests for vendor contacts from any of the other recovery teams should be funnelled through the vendor contact team.


          1. Damage Assessment and Salvage Team: This group, depending on the nature of the disaster, will likely be engaged at the disaster site, trying to determine its original state, or trying to salvage any equipment or data possible. This group would also be responsible for signage and for roping off areas of the facility that may be dangerous or inaccessible.


          1. Business Interface Team: This group, sometimes forgotten in the chaos, is responsible to the business itself to make sure that their needs are being met and their priorities are being addressed by the recovery efforts. If the business is working to bring back a particular group first, it is important that this team be made aware of it so efforts are matched across all departments. At the same time, this team makes sure that the business people don't interfere with the IT department’s efforts.


          1. Logistics Team: This group handles all of the details that are part of the recovery effort. They make sure that there is food, water, space to work, and telephone service, and they handle all of the other seemingly unimportant tasks that would cause the entire recovery to fail if they were overlooked.

If you don’t have some form of these disaster recovery teams in place, ask yourself why not, and then get to it!

 

For more information on developing successful backup strategies, contact ebackup Inc.

The Best Backup Solution

ebackup's Rapid Recovery software provides a simple fully automated and fully scalable, cost effective, yet robust and secure data protection solution, supporting clients from small businesses to enterprise scale corporations. We can help you develop a solid Disaster Recovery Plan as well as provide you with the technology tools to make it happen as easily and securely as possible.

For further information or assistance, please contact an ebackup representative:

Address

ebackup Inc.                                        Tel: (403) 259-3620

401 Forge Road SE                             Fax: (403) 259-3628

Calgary, Alberta, CANADA          Toll Free: 1-888-259-5745

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email: info@ebackupinc.com

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