PlanB Consulting provide a full range of disaster recovery services to their clients. Some of the key areas they have helped clients with are:
- Helping clients save money by ensuring that their disaster recovery provision is linked to organisation-wide agreed recovery levels.
- Reviewing the output of the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) against the existing disaster recovery provision, reporting to the client identified gaps.
- Working with the business units to make them aware of existing data backup provision and working with them to agree Recovery Point Objectives (RTOs) for applications across the organisation.
- Working with IT personnel to help them develop their incident response plans and ensuring that they are integrated with the organisation’s business continuity response.
- Bringing together IT and system users to agree recovery prioritisation.
- Reviewing existing and then providing alternative backup options and looking holistically at the client’s disaster recovery strategy.
Case study: local authority
The local authority’s disaster recovery plans were out of date and were not integrated with their newly developed business continuity plans. They were unsure whether their disaster recovery priorities were aligned to the requirements of their users and, although they had two data centres, they had a single point of failure as both data centres were situated in the same building. To address these issues they went out to tender, looking for advice in solving these issues. PlanB Consulting won the tender.
To address the issue of disaster recovery priorities PlanB Consulting brought together a representative from each of the sections within the authority to a series of workshops. At the workshops, PlanB Consulting ensured that they made use of the work already carried out by the authority’s business continuity team. The team had identified a list of activities across the authority and had agreed their RTOs with senior managers. At the workshop, participants agreed which applications underpinned the activities they carried out. The RTOs of the activities were then compared against the existing RTOs of the applications which were required to operate the activities, and the gaps were identified in a report.
PlanB Consulting reviewed their disaster recovery plan in order to update it and ensured that it integrated with the tactical and strategic business continuity plans written by the authority’s business continuity staff. New sections of the plan were developed, such as how IT was going to communicate across the authority in order to inform them of the incident and how the recovery was progressing. Finally, the impacts of loss of either or both data centres were identified and a number of costed options were given to the authority for them to develop their future disaster recovery strategy.
The project is in its final stages of completion but at the end of it the authority will have a disaster recovery plan which, integrated into their business continuity response structure, will ensure that in the event of an incident plans are coordinated. This will lead to faster recovery and better communication with stakeholders during a major incident. By understanding the requirements of the section with the authority and agreeing recovery times of applications when purchasing disaster recovery, money will be saved by ensuring that any disaster recovery provision is what the organisation actually needs. The authority will better understand their IT risks and therefore purchasing decisions will be risk based, saving the authority money and increasing the organisation’s resilience.
