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COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL LAN DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN Technologists often exhibit an unexpected response when asked by management to produce a disaster recovery plan for an automated system. They get genuinely ticked off. In the mind of a good technologist, this request is often interpreted as a signal that management does not trust them to recover in the event of a disaster. They look at the disaster recovery plan as some kind of a test to prove they know how to do their jobs! Those responsible for technical systems in virtually any organization are capable of recovering from a disaster under virtually any type of circumstance. This may sound like a very surprising statement, especially coming from someone who writes disaster recovery plans for a living; it is however, quite true. The technical service staffs in most companies are very capable of recovering from many types of outages. After all, these are the very people who designed and built the system in the fist place! They know where every wire in the organization runs (well, usually) and have more committed to memory about their company than most of us could learn in a decade. But what happens when key personnel are either incapacitated by the disaster, or maybe don’t report for work ever again. After all, most have families which will be the primary concern after a major disaster. Would you come to work if your family was home alone, and your home was in danger of being looted? One of my personal favorite ways to check the disaster recovery plan is to come into an organization and kill the LAN administrator. (No, not really – remember, it’s just a test!) The reason I like to pick on the LAN manager is that this key person phenomena is especially troublesome in distributed LAN environments. The point is, what happens to an organization’s response when these key people are not available in a disaster? It’s really interesting to see how the organization responds after the loss of a key player. In light of these thoughts, it is important you present disaster recovery to your staff, not as some type of a quiz or test to prove they know their jobs, but in light of these facts, that other coworkers may be called to execute this plan. This means everything needs to be documented in a format designed to be easily followed by an outside technical person supporting the recovery efforts. Hint: Use a lot of pictures, a lot of diagrams, and spell out where everything is! It’s important for the people coordinating the recovery and response to know what was installed. Therefore, an important component to any recovery plan is an equipment inventory. At a minimum this should include:
Other items are helpful as well, such as:
Using this approach, quick command decisions are possible, even in the heat of the moment during a disaster. The more information on hand in a digestible format to provide rationale for these decisions, the better for the company and the decision maker. Another item to consider is the software inventory, encompassing all software required for operation of all missing critical equipment. This inventory should include:
Other items which may find a useful place in an equipment inventory include such things as the location of third-party equipment suppliers. Since much of your equipment may be a few years old, it may already be seeing activity on the secondary market and be more easily acquired there. Any mission-critical piece of equipment should have a disaster recovery plan, it behooves all to get this recovery plan from the vendor first. Such equipment should include things like mission-critical servers, mainframe computers, bridges, routers and gateways. The higher the price tag, the greater the likelihood your vendor may work with you. In any event, it is much more cost-effective to negotiate disaster recovery services with a vendor while they are actively after your business than to try to add these services later. "Importing" Data
for the Plan Importing means finding databases and repositories of information within the organization which you can reasonably expect to stay up to date, and then acquiring them for the plan, either manually, via magnetic media, or most preferably over a LAN. For example, when a piece of equipment is purchased, a document or file for the equipment is archived. Often times, the contract and the documentation to the equipment goes to accounting, where it’s stashed away by the bean counters to be amortized. If you are lucky, documentation is stored on a LAN which may be accessible to you. The key is to locate and identify these repositories of equipment inventory data so they can be imported gracefully into the recovery plan. Organizations which make heavy use of internetworked LANs have an advantage in importing data. Here it becomes relatively straightforward to import data from other departments connected to the same LAN. In this fashion, any time a file is updated, for example, in an accounting department, showing a new piece of equipment, there are a number of ways this could be automatically transferred without human intervention to a critical file within the recovery plan. Object-linking Microsoft Word files, for example, is one way of doing this. By keying in on a specific file name, in this case in the accounting department, a technical service manager can be assured every time that department updates an equipment-list repository file, the file in his recovery plan will also be similar updated. Maintaining up-to-date telephone numbers for personnel and critical equipment vendors is absolutely essential to the successful implementation of the plan, and similar methodology must be employed to ensure accuracy. Once again, this means importing data from reputable sources. Consider home telephone numbers for employees. There are many places within the organization you can go to find a home telephone number for key employees; such as human resources and the company telephone directory. Human resources may be the best place to get this information. However, you may also find an employee who has worked for the company for 20 years still has the same address on file he had when hired. The company telephone directory may be a better bet in this case. The key is to identify, verify, then import. Speaking of numbers, many others will be needed in the plan. These include telephone numbers for key equipment vendors and suppliers. Oftentimes, these can be found in the network control center, help desk, or other operational environments with day-today contact with these vendors. When telephone numbers for key vendors and suppliers change, these people are the first to know. Importing is best performed through object linking files together, perhaps in a LAN environment. It can also be accomplished through use of a Sneaker net and floppy disk. The important thing is it be done regularly, and preferably, without human intervention. Consider importing components of the corporate-wide recovery plan. It makes little sense for a technical recovery planner to write procedures for such broad-based concerns as loss of a building, physical security, fire procedures, bomb threats, and other items which are company-wide in effect and scope. Indeed, as far as the make-up of the recovery plan, your recovery plan itself will probably end up being imported into a corporate-wide recovery plan for execution by an emergency management team. It works both ways. What Goes In the Plan?
Broad-based Document
Disaster recovery plans are complex, and can ultimately take two years or more to complete. For this reason, don’t be ashamed to ask for some outside help. While this can be taken in one way as an advertising plug from a disaster recovery consultant, it also comes from experience. In today’s busy operational environments, disaster recovery planning usually becomes kitchen table work, if it gets done at all. Regardless of who does the work however, by understanding the components of a successful plan, and devoting an enthusiastic outlook to the project, you will be secure in the knowledge that you are not only protecting the interests of the company, but your long term future as well. Good luck. Figure 1: The Eight R’s of a Successful Recovery Plan
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