Our Approach to Managing
Disasters
The RPM Approach "Revving
up your contingency plans"
The RPM (Recovery Process
Methodology) approach breaks the recovery planning process into concise
phases so that the project team and stakeholders can gain a better
understanding of the complexities, requirements (business and technical),
and activities needed to assess, develop and implement a viable plan.
The RPM
for individual projects can be broken down into 5 distinct phases:
Phase
I - Assessment and Audit of Environment
The first step in creating a
successful Disaster Recovery Solution is to perform audits for the purpose
of developing and implementing a Disaster Recovery Plan. Our audits are
highly dynamic and specifically geared for each individual company. By
assessing your current infrastructure, we can determine your needs and
suggest a solution that will meet your needs and your budget.
The following are typical
activities associated with the assessment phase:
Often this audit includes a
review of the following areas:
-
Business Units
-
Federal, State, and County
Regulations as they pertain to the target business units
-
Risk assessment of critical
interfaces with other corporations or technology centers
-
Data elements for recovery
significance
-
Existing hardware and
software for recovery significance
-
Fail over, restoration, live
switch-over testing
-
Down time strategy (planned
and unplanned)
Phase II - Planning and
Strategy
Our organization works
hand-in-hand with your staff to ensure an optimal plan is designed and
implemented. The plan is fully documented and presented to your staff for
sign-off and approval.
A typical disaster recovery
plan would contain some of the following items:
-
Introduction to the Plan
-
Disaster Recovery Plan Organization Responsibilities
-
Pre-disaster
-
Disaster Mode
-
Disaster Neutralization
-
Post-disaster
-
Recovery Strategy
-
Approach
-
Escalation plan and/or
process
-
Decision Tree
-
Disaster Recovery Procedures
in a check list with an approved format
-
Plan for the System
Administration Process
-
Appendix. This section often
includes the following types of information:
-
Necessary phone numbers
and contact points
-
Disaster Recovery Manager
Responsibilities
-
Distribution of the
Disaster Recovery Plan
-
Maintenance of the
Business Impact Analysis
-
Training of the Disaster
Recovery Team
-
Testing of the Disaster
Recovery Plan
-
Evaluation of the Disaster
Recovery Plan Tests
-
Maintenance of the
Disaster Recovery Process and Plan
-
Improvements and
modifications to the Disaster Recovery Plan
-
Switch-over procedures (if
a Hotsite exists)
-
FEMA interface contacts
and procedures
It is also recognized that
down time during a recovery or switchover could mean loss of revenue for
your company, especially if the down time is prolonged. Therefore, assessing
these real-time critical operations with financial concerns in mind is
stressed during the assessment, design, and planning phases of disaster
recovery operations.
Phase
III - Implementation
The assessment, audit, and
planning phases mean nothing without a solid plan of action. When it comes
to implementing a viable Disaster Recovery Solution, the Circadian team has
a plethora of services available to fit the needs of your organization, be
those needs large or small.
Phase
IV - Testing and Rehearsal
As with any elaborate Disaster
Recovery strategy, there exists a testing phase to ensure all the services
work as expected. After installing a solution within your organization, our
company goes through rigorous testing exercises to make certain that your
solution works as designed. In the cases of failover technology, this phase
is quite elaborate, as Circadian must test all aspects of a failover
scenario. This ensures that the solution provided meets all of the needs
described in the initial assessment phase.
It is recommended that the
client periodically participates in a “rehearsal” disaster to test the
validity of the Circadian disaster recovery solutions. The “rehearsal”
disaster is a staged failure designed to test the efficacy of the Circadian
services and software. This also allows the client to become familiar with a
disaster situation and the process for disaster recovery. Think of this as a
fire drill in which everyone becomes familiar with how to behave in the
event of a disaster.
Phase
V - Training
Finally, we offer training to
your staff on our software packages and our services so that they are
knowledgeable of standard practices in a disaster or crisis situation. The
Circadian philosophy focuses on the idea of augmenting your staff, not
replacing them. Therefore, our strategy is to train your technical personnel
on our software and our procedures to give you in-house expertise should a
disaster occur. This step is important because your team will be the first
responders to an actual disaster.
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