Assessment of potential risks

When you start to prepare your plan it is useful to try and understand the potential risks you will be planning to mitigate.

The list will be different for each business but as a guide you should consider the following areas:

External Risks

• Extreme Weather
• Flood
• Snow
• Theft
• Terrorism Incident
• Transport issues

Loss of Utilities

• Electrical power failure
• Loss of gas
• Loss of water
• Telecoms failure

Equipment Failure

• Internal electrical failure
• Air conditioning failure
• IT system failure

Introduction to Disaster Recovery Planning

Disaster Recovery Planning is a business critical activity that will ensure that your organisation will be able to recover from a disaster quickly and with the minium of disruption.

The process can be very different in each organisation but every disaster recovery plan will contains the following sections:

1.  Assesment of potential risks.

2. Documentation of Business processes.

3. Mapping of business processes to dependant systems.

4. Impact analysis of the loss of dependant systems.

5. Disaster recovery strategy.

6. Business recovery strategy.

7. Maintenance of the plan.