Disaster Recovery planning

Our Disaster Recovery Review is a consultancy led process that engages your business at all levels to determine the health of your current disaster recovery arrangements and whether they realistically and pragmatically meet the requirements of your business.

The review sets out to look at the following areas:

  • Identify gaps in the current IT disaster recovery plan that may significantly impact the overall business recovery process.

  • Establish what recovery time and recovery point objectives are required by the business and whether these are achievable with the current plan.

  • Can the technologies/methodologies that are currently in operation achieve the required Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements of the business?

  • What are the financial, regulatory, and reputational risks associated with prolonged system or service downtime?

  • What is the impact to the business of prolonged system or service downtime?

  • Is the disaster recovery plan aligned with the business continuity plan (if one exists).

  • What dependencies exist within the IT department to execute the disaster recovery plan?

  • Identify the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the current IT disaster recovery solution.

  • Is there sufficient funding to achieve goals of business/IT?

At the outset of the review, we will work with your organisation’s management to determine who the key stakeholders are. We’ll then work with them to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), which will determine the importance of each function and capture all of the key business processes. The process is non-technical and is very much focused on the specific area of responsibility of the stakeholder.

Once understood, each process will be analysed against three specific areas:

  1. Financial risk of non-performance of that function

  2. Regulatory risk of non-performance of that function

  3. Client or reputational risk of non-performance of that function

The impact of each will be measured to determine how long any one particular service can be unavailable before it begins to impact the business. Armed with this information we will review the disaster recovery plan (if one exists) and perform a high-level GAP analysis to establish whether the plan is aligned with the business and can meet its desired recovery objectives. If no plan exists, we will work with you to identify what processes are to be followed to restore services in the event of a failure and help discover any relevant documentation to support this.

Having completed the BIA and GAP analysis we will work with your technical lead to review the infrastructure and systems architecture to determine whether they meet the agreed business objectives.