"What You've Got and What You Need.
(Information Gathering)"

Part 4 of the series on Disaster Recovery Planning

By Geoffrey C. Tritsch and Dr. Robert Kuhn
COMPASS CONSULTING INTERNATIONAL, INC.

In the preceding articles we've discussed general business continuity planning issues and analysis tools. In this article we move on to some of the more specific aspects of protection of your technology assets and the use of those assets in the case of an emergency, specifically we focus on information and communication. Of all the aspects of planning, this is the one that is most often underrated in terms of value and underestimated in terms of time.

Good records are vital to rapid response to a disaster. "Good" records are complete, accurate, up-to-date, and most importantly available. If you have your records on the database server and in hard copy in the machine room in which the server resided, and that room just went up in smoke, you are now in trouble.

What records do you need? You need information on:

• Spaces and pathways, rooms, conduits
• Equipment/Physical components
• Logical and physical network connectivity (including cabling: where it goes and what is on it)
• People: Normal roles, Disaster Preparedness roles, who backs up whom, who uses what to do what, contact information
• Procedures
• Priorities

Besides the basic information on things, and people, such as locations, descriptions, contact information, you need a lot of relational information.

• Who knows about what?
• What services run on which servers?
• Who uses what services for what purposes?
• Which vendors provide which services and equipment?
• What have vendors agreed to do in an emergency?
• If you need to restore services, what should take priority over what?
• How should decisions be made?

These last two questions of priorities and procedures need to be settled to protect both the institution and its officers. Public safety has to be the foremost concern, followed closely by legal requirements, then business priorities. Remember that business priorities may change by season (think of the Admissions Office in the spring), and by time of day (communication with the outside happens 9 am to 5 pm, but purely internal functions, however important, can be offset in time during a disaster to alleviate congestion on scarce resources). The most important procedures to put in place are hose that allow your people to respond to events without delay. In part, that means having responsibilities shared among teams of people.

Each inventoried item should list the alternatives. Server flooded - load backup on alternative; system manager in traction - call her backup. In fact, disaster preparation necessitates thinking in terms of clusters of equipment and teams of people. The research that goes into creating this database serves a double purpose. It is critical to timely response when disaster does occur, and it also tells you what equipment and people are critical to your operation and need to be protected by redundancy.

You can think of preparing the information as

The more decisions that can be made in the course of data gathering, the easier the planning will be.

In next month's article Writing and Selling the Plan we'll discuss two things, one whose importance is vastly overrated (the physical document which defines your business continuity plan) and one whose importance is vastly underrated (selling the plan to the constituencies).

Disaster Recovery Planning Series, Part
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Geoffrey Tritsch, President of Compass Consulting, has been a technology consultant specializing in higher education since 1980. He is a frequent presenter at workshops and conferences and a contributor professional journals.

As Senior Consultant with Compass Consulting, Dr. Robert Kuhn focuses on assisting clients with management and planning for information technology. His core competencies extend deep into the fundamentals: systems and applications technologies and complex networking.

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