Document and Maintain Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Put your DRP on a diet – keep it fit, trim, and ready for action.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

The traditional disaster recovery plan (DRP) “red binder” is dead. It takes too long to create, it’s too hard to maintain, and it’s not usable in a crisis.

“This blueprint outlines the following key tactics to streamline your documentation effort and produce a better result:

• Write for an IT audience and focus on how to recover. You don’t need 30 pages of fluff describing the purpose of the document.
• Use flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams over traditional manuals. This drives documentation that is more concise, easier to maintain, and effective in a crisis.
• Create your DRP in layers to get tangible results faster, starting with a recovery workflow that outlines your DR strategy, and then build out the specific documentation needed to support recovery.”

This project is about DRP documentation after you have clarified your DR strategy; create these necessary inputs first

These artifacts are the cornerstone for any disaster recovery plan.

• Business Impact Analysis
• DR Roles and Responsibilities
• Recovery Workflow

Missing a component? Start here. ➔ Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

This blueprint walks you through building these inputs.
Our approach saves clients on average US$16,825.22. (Clients self-reported an average saving of US$16,869.21 while completing the Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan blueprint through advisory calls, guided implementations, or workshops (Info-Tech Research Group, 2017, N=129).)

How this blueprint will help you document your DRP

This Research is Designed For:

• IT managers in charge of disaster recovery planning (DRP) and execution.
• Organizations seeking to optimize their DRP using best-practice methodology.
• Business continuity professionals that are involved with disaster recovery.

This Research Will Help You:

• Divide the process of creating DR documentation into manageable chunks, providing a defined scope for you to work in.
• Identify an appropriate DRP document management and distribution strategy.
• Ensure that DR documentation is up to date and accessible.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• IT managers preparing for a DR audit.
• IT managers looking to incorporate components of DR into an IT operations document.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Follow a structured approach in building DR documentation using best practices.
• Integrate DR into day-to-day IT operations.

Executive summary

Situation

• DR documentation is often driven by audit or compliance requirements, rather than aimed at the team that would need to execute recovery.
• Traditional DRPs are text-heavy, 300+ page manuals that are simply not usable in a crisis.
• Compounding the problem, DR documentation is rarely updated, so it’s just shelf-ware.

Complication

• DRP is often given lower priority as day-to-day IT projects displace DR documentation efforts.
• Inefficient publishing strategies result in your DRP not being accessible during disasters or key staff not knowing where to find the latest version.
• Organizations that create traditional DRPs end up with massive manuals that are difficult to maintain, so they quickly become unreliable.

Resolution

• Create visual and concise DR documentation that strips out unnecessary content and is written for an IT audience – the team that would actually be executing the recovery. Your business leaders can take the same approach to create separate business response plans – don’t mix the two into an all-in-one plan that is not effective for either audience.
• Determine a documentation distribution strategy that supports ease of maintenance and accessibility during a disaster.
• Incorporate DRP maintenance into change management and project intake procedures to systematically update and refine the DR documentation. Don’t save up changes for a year-end blitz, which turns document maintenance into an onerous project.

Info-Tech Insight

1. DR documentation fails when organizations try to boil the ocean with an all-in-one plan aimed at auditors, business leaders, and IT. It’s too long, too hard to maintain, and ends up being little more than shelf-ware.
2. Using flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams aimed at an IT audience is more concise and effective in a disaster, quicker to create, and easier to maintain.
3. Create your DRP in layers to keep the work manageable. Start with a recovery workflow to ensure a coordinated response, and build out supporting documentation over time.

An effective DRP that mitigates a wide range of potential outages is critical to minimizing the impact of downtime

The criticality of having an effective DRP is underestimated.

Cost of Downtime for the Fortune 1000

• Cost of unplanned apps downtime per year: $1.25B to $2.5B
• Cost of critical apps failure per hour: $500,000 to $1M
• Cost of infrastructure failure per hour: $100,000
• 35% reported to have recovered within 12 hours.
• 17% of infrastructure failures took more than 24 hours to recover.
• 13% of application failures took more than 24 hours to recover.

Size of Impact Increasing Across Industries

• The cost of downtime is rising across the board and not just for organizations that traditionally depend on IT (e.g. e-commerce).
• Downtime cost increase since 2010:
  • Hospitality: 129% increase
  • Transportation: 108% increase
  • Media organizations: 104% increase

Potential Lost Revenue

The impact of downtime increases significantly over time, not just in terms of lost revenue (as illustrated here) but also goodwill/reputation and health/safety. An effective DR solution and overall resiliency that mitigate a wide range of potential outages are critical to minimizing the impact of downtime.

Without an effective DRP, your organization is gambling on being able to define and implement a recovery strategy during a time of crisis. At the very least, this means extended downtime – potentially weeks – and substantial impact.

Only 38% of those with a full or mostly complete DRP believe their DRPs would be effective in a real crisis

Organizations continue to struggle with creating DRPs, let alone making them actionable.

Why are so many living with either an incomplete or ineffective DRP? For the same reasons that IT documentation in general continues to be a pain point:

• It is an outdated model of what documentation should be – the traditional manual with detailed (lengthy) descriptions and procedures.
• Despite the importance of DR, low priority is placed on creating a DRP and the day-to-day SOPs required to support a recovery.
• There is a lack of effective processes for ensuring documentation stays up to date.

(Source: Info-Tech Research Group, N=165)

(Source: Info-Tech Research Group, N=69 (includes only those who indicated DRP is mostly completed or completed))

Improve usability and effectiveness with visual-based and more-concise documentation

Choose flowcharts over process guides, checklists over lengthy procedures, and diagrams over descriptions.

If you need a three-inch binder to hold your DRP, imagine having to flip through it to determine next steps during a crisis.

DR documentation needs to be concise, scannable, and quickly understood to be effective. Visual-based documentation meets these requirements, so it’s no surprise that it also leads to higher DR success.

DR success scores are based on:

• Meeting recovery time objectives (RTOs).
• Meeting recovery point objectives (RPOs).
• IT staff’s confidence in their ability to meet RTOs/RPOs.

“Without question, 300-page DRPs are not effective. I mean, auditors love them because of the detail, but give me a 10-page DRP with contact lists, process flows, diagrams, and recovery checklists that are easy to follow.” (Bernard Jones, MBCI, CBCP, CORP, Manager Disaster Recovery/BCP, ActiveHealth Management)

Maintainability is another argument for visual-based, concise documentation

There are two end goals for your DR documentation: effectiveness and maintainability. Without either, you will not have success during a disaster.

Organizations using a visual-based approach were 30% more likely to find that DR documentation is easy to maintain.	➔	“Easy to maintain” leads to a 46% higher rate of DR success.

Not only are visual-based disaster recovery plans more effective, but they are also easier to maintain.

Overcome documentation inertia with a tiered model that allows you to eat the elephant one bite at a time

Start with a recovery workflow to at least ensure a coordinated response. Then use that workflow to determine required supporting documentation.

Recovery Workflow: Starting the project with overly detailed documentation can slow down the entire process. Overcome planning inertia by starting with high-level incident response plans in a flowchart format. For examples and additional information, see XMPL Medical’s Recovery Workflows.

Recovery Procedures (Systems Recovery Playbook): For each step in the high-level flowchart, create recovery procedures where necessary using additional flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams as appropriate. Leverage Info-Tech’s Systems Recovery Playbook example as a starting point.

Additional Reference Documentation: Reference existing IT documentation, such as network diagrams and configuration documents, as well as more detailed step-by-step procedures where necessary (e.g. vendor documentation), particularly where needed to support alternate recovery staff who may not be as well versed as the primary system owners.

Info-Tech Insight

Organizations that use flowcharts, checklist, and diagrams over traditional, dense DRP manuals are far more likely to meet their RTOs/RPOs because their documentation is more usable and easier to maintain.

Use a DRP summary document to satisfy executives, auditors, and clients

Stakeholders don’t have time to sift through a pile of paper. Summarize your overall continuity capabilities in one, easy-to-read place.

DRP Summary Document

• Summarize BIA results
• Summarize DR strategy (including DR sites)
• Summarize backup strategy
• Summarize testing and maintenance plans

Follow Info-Tech’s methodology to make DRP documentation efficient and effective

Follow XMPL Medical’s journey through DR documentation

CASE STUDY

Industry Healthcare
Source Created by amalgamating data from Info-Tech’s client base

Streamline your documentation and maintenance process by following the approach outlined in XMPL Medical’s journey to an end-to-end DRP.

Outline of the Disaster Recovery Plan

XMPL’s disaster recovery plan includes its business impact analysis and a subset of tier 1 and tier 2 patient care applications.

Its DRP includes incident response flowcharts, system recovery checklists, and a communication plan. Its DRP also references IT operations documentation (e.g. asset management documents, system specs, and system configuration docs), but this material is not published with the example documentation.

Resulting Disaster Recovery Plan

XMPL’s DRP includes actionable documents in the form of high-level disaster response plan flowcharts and system recovery checklists. During an incident, the DR team is able to clearly see the items for which they are responsible.

Disaster Recovery Plan

• Recovery Workflow
• Business Impact Analysis
• DRP Summary
• System Recovery Checklists
• Communication, Assessment, and Disaster Declaration Plan

Info-Tech Best Practice

XMPL Medical’s disaster recovery plan illustrates an effective DRP. Model your end-to-end disaster recovery plan after XMPL’s completed templates. The specific data points will differ from organization to organization, but the structure of each document will be similar.

Model your disaster recovery documentation off of our example

CASE STUDY

Industry Healthcare
Source Created by amalgamating data from Info-Tech’s client base

Recovery Workflow:

• Recovery Workflows (PDF, VSDX)

Recovery Procedures (Systems Recovery Playbook):

• DR Notification, Assessment, and Disaster Declaration Plan
• Systems Recovery Playbook
• Network Topology Diagrams

Additional Reference Documentation:

• DRP Workbook
• Business Impact Analysis
• DRP Summary Document

Use Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard to evaluate your progress

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Document and Maintain Your Disaster Recovery Plan – Project Overview

	1. Streamline DRP Documentation	2. Select the Optimal DRP Publishing Strategy	3. Keep Your DRP Relevant
Best-Practice Toolkit	1.1 Start with a recovery workflow 1.2 Create supporting DRP documentation 1.3 Write the DRP summary	2.1 Create Committee Profiles	3.1 Build Governance Structure Map 3.2 Create Committee Profiles
Guided Implementations	Review Info-Tech’s approach to DRP documentation. Create a high-level recovery workflow. Create supporting DRP documentation. Write the DRP summary.	Identify criteria for selecting a DRP publishing strategy. Select a DRP publishing strategy. Optional: Select requirements for a BCM tool and issue an RFP. Optional: Review responses to RFP.	Learn best practices for integrating DRP maintenance into day-to-day IT processes. Learn best practices for DRP-focused reviews.
Onsite Workshop	Module 1: Streamline DRP documentation	Module 2: Select the optimal DRP publishing strategy	Module 3: Learn best practices for keeping your DRP relevant
	Phase 1 Outcome: A complete end-to-end DRP	Phase 2 Outcome: Selection of a publishing and management tool for your DRP documentation	Phase 3 Outcome: Strategy for maintaining your DRP documentation

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Workshop Goal: Learn how to document and maintain your DRP.

Use these icons to help direct you as you navigate this research

Use these icons to help guide you through each step of the blueprint and direct you to content related to the recommended activities.

This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project.

This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members, who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.

Phase 1: Streamline DRP Documentation

Step 1.1: Start with a recovery workflow

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Review a model DRP.
• Review your recovery workflow.
• Identify documentation required to support the recovery workflow.

This step involves the following participants:

• DRP Owner
• System SMEs
• Alternate DR Personnel

Outcomes of this step

• Understanding the visual-based, concise approach to DR documentation.
• Creating a recovery workflow that provides a roadmap for coordinating incident response and identifying required supporting documentation.

Info-Tech Insights

A DRP is a collection of procedures and supporting documents that allow an organization to recover its IT services to minimize system downtime for the business.