Disaster Recovery

In order to protect a business and the employees against any incident, the company needs to produce a Disaster Recovery Manual to enable a prompt, safe and thorough recovery from all potential risks.

A paper copy of this Manual should kept remotely in another office, and key personnel should have paper and electronic copies at home locations.

The procedures should assume that not all the key personnel will be available and should make contingency plans for this.

The plan should cover two scenarios: -

· The incident happens during normal working hours and there are personnel on site.

· The incident happens out of hours, and management only hear about the incident from another party (e.g. Police, Fire, contracted security office)

The document should aim to set out the procedures that need to be put in place to allow all critical systems to carry on functioning due to unforeseen circumstances outside your control. With the aid of the document you will be able to locate, diagnose and follow an agreed plan of action to rectify the problem.

Sample topics

Phone System

If the telephone system fails in any way then there needs to be a list of check carried out to ascertain if it is an equipment failure or it is a British Telecom line failure. For resilience, voice & data you could use a mixture of systems.

Major Incident

If the office has an incident, e.g. fire, gas explosion, bomb scare, then who would have your details and are able to contact you, 24 hours a day ?.

There should be an evacuation procedure posted on the staff notice board and all staff should have been asked to familiarise themselves with this. Once the police arrive they will take over immediately.

Water leak

Sources of water are;

Leaking roof

Leaking wall / fire door / window

Radiator leaking

Air conditioning

Leak from toilets / kitchen

What contingences do you have to recover / restore your business ?