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Redline Communications Inc. Confidential and Proprietary
7
Disaster Recovery
Overview
This chapter provides some very basic guidelines for recovery of your RedMAX
network.These guidelines can be used in addition to other plans that you may have for your
entire network.
If you are new to recovery planning, make sure that you research the subject thoroughly
before starting your disaster recovery project. You may want to consider hiring a consultant
to help with your project planning. Disaster recovery planning is not a two-day project, nor
is it a project that once completed, you can forget about. An effective recovery plan must
be maintained constantly and tested regularly.
The primary objective of your plan is to enable your network to survive a disaster and to
re-establish normal business operations within a reasonable time frame. The goals of your
plan should be to:
•
Identify potential weaknesses and address any issues;
•
Minimize the duration of a serious disruption to network operations;
•
Facilitate effective co-ordination of recovery tasks; and
•
Reduce the complexity of the recovery effort.
Some basic examples are provided here as well as suggestions for a recovery plan.s
Impact Assessment
The first step of your plan is to define an impact assessment plan for all equipment and
applications that are part of the network environment. This plan will require you to:
•
identify critical systems, processes and functions;
•
assess the economic impact of incidents and disasters that result in denial of access
to systems, services and facilities;
•
assess the length of time that your business can survive without access to systems,
services and facilities.
Your impact assessment plan should then be used as a basis for identifying systems and
resources required to the critical systems, processes and functions.