I've recently been tasked with handling business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning at my workplace, and honestly, I'm feeling a bit lost about how to approach this. The previous person in this role left behind some documents on SharePoint, but I'm unsure of what I should do from here. Our company is undergoing restructuring and constantly adding new IT services, which adds to my confusion. I want to understand how other companies keep their BC/DR documents up to date and what steps they take. A few specific questions come to mind:
1. Do you maintain a dependency map of all systems?
2. How do you keep your documents current when infrastructure changes often?
3. Do you run simulations where you test certain systems going down, and how often do you do these tests?
4. How do larger organizations handle this complexity, and is there an effective process that can be replicated?
Thanks for any insights you can share!
5 Answers
When I was involved, we created a plan for every system where the system owner outlined a restoration process in line with change management rules. We executed these plans during quarterly DR tests, which taught us a lot even if we didn't always succeed. It's all about documenting pain points, both technical and team-related, so you know what to improve for next time. I suggest starting by reviewing how your company has handled past DR events — it gives you a solid foundation for creating your own processes.
Starting with a budget is key! If money isn’t a problem, you can look into active/active setups, but for tighter budgets, strategies like warm standby or backup/restore are common. Focus on documenting critical systems like your ERP and CRM, and decide on acceptable recovery time objectives with input from business units.
It's crucial to involve all business stakeholders when planning BC/DR. The focus should be on business processes, with IT supporting those processes. If you see it merely as an IT task, you're missing a major part of the puzzle!
Yes! We map out dependencies per business application so we know exactly what needs to be restored first if an issue arises. Keeping documents current is a challenge — we rely on the infrastructure teams to provide updates, but that often doesn't happen until our annual testing. Running drills and simulations regularly gives you the practice to keep procedures fresh.
We utilize Veeam for our backups and manage our DR site with offline hot replicas that can be activated quickly. This allows us to streamline recovery. Also, it's helpful to have a dependency map that outlines which systems are critical for overall recovery — we rank them based on importance.
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