A Disaster Recovery plan is hard to template. Any template is really a list of twenty (or a few hundred) questions as to how important "up time" is and what extent you will go towards ensuring maximum up time.
In reality a DR plan needs to reflect the way in which you do business. A DR plan for a web hosting company is quite different to a DR plan for a company doing batch processing of mail-order requests, and different again to a consulting firm selling services.
Also, there are levels of DR - things like the physical building being compromised down to a disk drive failing - so it can be quite wide ranging and need to get some level of Scope into your DR plan.
So, there are a few different perspectives you need to look at:
1) Business Operations - which parts of the business are critically impacted by various outages
2) Business Automation - what are the applications that enables the business to minimally operate
3) Business Processes - which parts can revert to a manual process, which parts are dependant on automation, which parts are not time critical
4) Outages - how long and what kind of turnaround is required for any of the above to ensure a) negligible impact, b) reasonable inconvenience, c) skeletal operations
5) Infrastructure - communications network - including any thrid party involvement / suppliers / hosting services
6) Backup - data backup, machine backups, redunancy of crticial hardware and infrastructure, alternate power supplies
7) Hardware - Full network diagrams, current capacities, current service / warranties / support arrangements
8) Hardware replacement program - when and how are machines recycled - are they sutied as fall-back servers
9) Resources - who do you have access to and how long would it take to "mobilise" the DR team ?
10) Outsourcing - look at the possibility of hosted services, off site data, remote / companion offices for a DR site.
11) Proof - run through a few scenarios...
There are a couple of templates out there, but at the end of the day, your DR must fulfill the busines requirement in an affordable, practical and achievable way - because once it is in place, you will need to test it. And try not to get too pedantic, the difference of one hour can be extreme in many more ways than one.
Please let us know if there is something more specific you would like...
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by: CorpCompPosted on 2008-08-01 at 04:28:44ID: 22137179
A Disaster recovery plan comes down to what measures you have in place. It really needs to be designed around the type of system you have, and the backups you have in place.
I could give you the disaster recovery plan I have, but it wouldn't do you any goods unless you had shadow copy enabled, tape backups performed by backup exec, and more than one domain controller in your domain.
What do you have in your domain:
How many domain controllers, and what type?
How many mail servers, and what type?
What LOB (Line of Business) applications does your business rely on?
What backup solution do you have in place?
You can't even begin to formulate a disaster recovery plan until you answer these questions....