Disaster Recovery Definitions and Declarations

[kp.ramen]

Hello,

I'm an IT Analyst working in Disaster Recovery (DR) for a Fortune 200 manufacturing company.

I'm doing a little research on disaster recovery and what qualifies as a disaster. Can those of you who work in the DR space provide me with what you and/or your company define as a disaster?

When is it appropriate to invoke a company’s IT disaster recovery plan?

- What qualifies as an IT disaster?
- What kind of resources are needed to start performing recovery?
- How much time must past (service outage) before a disaster can be declared?
- Are disaster definitions intentionally vague or are there specific milestones that need to be met before an IT disaster can be declared?
- What role does fail over play in the definition of disaster?
- What is the difference between an IT disaster and a major/serious incident?

Looking forward to hearing your responses. Thank you.

Cheers,
kp

 

[Paperlantern]

Youve got Availability (servers being up, users accessing databases, websites, etc), Integrity (Data being true and correct without being altered by malicious, mistaken, or natural occurances) and Confidentiality (Disclosure of sensitive data that could hurt the company legally, financially, or both). If any of those are compromised for a length of time that interrupts normal operations, or to an extent of legal action or significant financial loss, it can be considered an IT disaster. Though depending on the actual incident the magnitude can vary.

Resources needed vary from company to company, IT system to IT system. It depends on the systems you are trying to recover, and the way you back them up. You could have anything from some old fashioned tape backups that you would then need a viable, good backup, and a working system to start restoring data and operations to. To a real time hot site that replicates everything your company does and can be up and operational in minutes if the primary site were to lose power, burn down, etc etc.

Time is also dependant of the systems in place. E mail server goes down... some people can operate without e mail for an hour, two hours, half a day, other communications such as phones and faxes can be used until the e mail comes on line again, other outages such as a companies primary CMS can tolerate much shorter downtimes.

They are only vague if the company deems them to be, again it rests fully on what type of systems and business are being run, how critical are things to the company's operations and profits.

Again these are defined by the company, it can mean different things for different IT infrastructures. An IT disaster in general terms would probably include loss of a CMS database and having to restore form a backup, or the company's phone system going down and having to be repaired. A serious incident could be a hostage situation on the extreme, or a fire in the server room damaging equipment and endagering human life.

But again, A LOT of what you are asking are relative to the systems in question, and vary heavily from one implementation to another.

 

[unokitty]

Contingency Planning Guide for Information Technology Systems