What I've Been Doing At Work

I want to state where I am with the disaster recovery documentation I am writing at work. In my opinion, the term 'disaster recovery' is as big as the world so what I want to do is to reduce it to a concept that is easily understandable. Therefore, what I have done is divided the term 'disaster recovery' into 5 phases:

1. Activation and Notification Phase - this phase is all about figuring out there is a disaster, what plan is going to be followed, and alerting anyone that will be impacted by the disaster that there will be an interruption to the systems they routinely use.
2. Pre-System Recovery Phase - specific to my project, there are 16 critical systems. Some of those systems are what you might think of as applications - Microsoft Word - while others are systems that you might think of as prerequisite systems - Microsoft Windows - as a limited in scope example. I am thinking only about the fact that Microsoft Windows is a prerequisite to using Microsoft Word. Thus, this phase is about restoring the prerequisite systems that are required to be in place before restoring other systems.
3. System Recovery Phase - This phase is all about restoring the systems that are used by end-users, such as Microsoft Word within the context of the example in the Pre-System Recovery Phase.
4. Service Recovery Phase - this phase is all about testing and validating that the systems have been restored. For example, continuing the Microsoft Windows / Microsoft Word example, this phase would be about opening Microsoft Word and verifying that it actually opens and functions.
5. Return to Normal Operations Phase - this phase is all about alerting anyone that will be impacted by the disaster that the interruption to the systems they routinely use is over. Anyone that routinely uses a system should be able to use it again, as if the disaster never happened even though we all know it did. <grin>

I won't go into additional details on this blog but that is the mile-high view of my daily work.