How to successfully implement a disaster recovery plan (page 2 of 2)

Organisations have spent a huge amount of time, effort, and money (in many cases years and tens of millions of dollars) on their implementations. This massive investment warrants continuity.

It is a fact that downtime can have a negative impact on customers, suppliers, manufacturing operations, regional stores, corporate offices, and shareholders. Possible effects of downtime could include un-met payroll, unshipped products, funds unable to be processed by accounts receivable, employees unable to get their work done, and disgruntled customers.

Working in Partnership
With such integrated, distributed, large, critical, and complex enterprise applications, it is important to involve business process owners in the design and implementation of a strategy for high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery. It is no longer sufficient to have the disaster recovery manager handle this alone, with only a standard recovery program consisting of backup tapes shipped to a hot site.

Knowledge of ERP applications and the underlying architecture has not typically been the domain of the business continuity and disaster recovery department. However, VERITAS Consulting consider it to be essential to understand the availability and continuity requirements of these applications and to be involved in the continuity planning process for these environments.

Your Data Centre is down - What's the plan?
Business leaders may recognise the need to move to more aggressive e-business recovery strategies, but they're often unwilling to fund the change. Education can help. One of the unexpected benefits of implementing an ERP system is that it requires the business and IT professionals to work together. This partnership should continue into the business continuity arena.

Whenever possible, before completing an enterprise application project as an implementation or upgrade continuity and recovery should be addressed. Then, the necessary procedures and solutions can be built into the environment, rather than being retro-fitted later.

The most successful ERP implementations are the result of a collaborative effort between the business and VERITAS Consulting in all phases, from selection, to customisation, to "go live." It follows logically that the business process owners, IT departments and VERITAS Consulting work together on the continuity and recovery plans.

The best plans are executed through discussion among professionals from various disciplines within an organisation. For example, the people who should take part in the planning and execution of a continuity and recovery strategy should include:

• Key business application users (Who is using the most critical applications?)

• The manager of each critical process (e.g., finance manager, payroll manager, customer relationship manager, supply chain manager, e-business manager, etc.)

• Internal and external customers, suppliers, and partners (to establish recovery requirements, including recovery time and recovery point objectives)

• Business process managers (when extending ERP to SCM, CRM, e-business, etc., those business process managers should also be involved)

• Data centre managers

• ERP program directors for both business and information technology

• Disaster recovery specialists/business continuity/disaster recovery manager/VERITAS Consulting

• Software application specialists
• Database administrators
• Hardware specialists
• Networking specialists
• Systems engineers