Preparing for eventual misfortune is as a burden at times. Staff are at capacity. Committing weekend time to an unlikely event is aggravating. Burden is accentuated by a final report showing critical operations fully restored. What employee wants to hear that? After a nuclear bomb they want to go home. Focus on "Identify" so everybody has a sense of value.
Identifying Critical Systems
It is a straight forward excercise. Although every department will claim they can not operate without Outlook, first ask if the department is critical to the business and then add Outlook to the DR plan. Generally critical systems will greatly impact revenue and or reputation. For example, during a disaster not much will be going on in terms of sales, so Salesforce may not be critical during an event. However, the inexpensive custom billing tool will be critical to maintaining revenue levels until business is restored. If it supports a critical part of the business then it is a critical system.
Identify Critical Supporting Systems
All technology has dependencies without which they will not function properly. For example, your Accounting department interacts with Dynamics 365 with an on-prem database. During a disaster the user interface may not be critical, but the database should be part of the DR plan. Many organization deploy a Data Warehouse into which most critical systems push data. Having the DW included in the DR plan may be critical to restoring the business and helping executive management assess the overall state of the organization.
Identify Critical System Owners
Questions will arise during a disaster and DR excercise. Every critical systems should have an assigned owner who is familiar with how the system works and what business need it serves.
Identify Infrastructure Hosting Critical Systems
Is the systems behind an F5? Is the critical systems application hosting the SSL cert or the F5 client node? Is the system running in a VM or physical server? Understanding the current infra state will be essential to developing a DR infra state.
Identify Critical System Requirements
Systems have specific runtimes, configuration requirements, networking requirement and hardware requirements. A good understanding of what it currently takes to run critical system applications will make it easier to spec out DR environments.
Identify Tasks to Validate Critical Systems in a DR Environment
Properly testing systems in a DR environment is crucial to establishing business continuity during an event. A successful validation will signal to the business to care on as best as possible until everything is restored.
In summary, Developing a DR plan is fairly straight forward when starting with the "Identify" approach. When key definitions are delivered across the organization, teams and stakeholders will know what is expected from them then developing an implementation plan will come organically.
