Successful down time reduction for information technology facilities and services requires three pre-conditions.

1.         You must know what constitutes a disaster.

Every business is different, so the conditions that constitutes a disaster will vary from business to business. You will need a very clear idea of what would constitute a disaster for your business.

A disaster is an event, which presents your business performing critical functions for a defined period of time.

To define a disaster, you must therefore consider both systems and time.

·         Systems: what systems are critical to your business (i.e. what systems would make it impossible for your business to function if you didn’t have them)? Systems include hardware, software applications, data files, internal communications (networks) and external communications (phone / data communication lines)

·         Time: how long would it take for your business to suffer serious consequences if those systems were not available.

2.         You must have a plan for recovering from a disaster.

Having defined the systems and times which are critical to your business, you must develop a recovery plan.

The plan does not need to be a large and complex document. A good plan is a simple plan for small or medium sized business.

The plan does not need to predict potential causes of a disaster: if a critical system is out of action, the cause is less important that the solution (and disasters are often unpredictable).

The plan must consider what is to be done, who does it and when it is to be done. Part 3 of this document provides a simple template for a step-by-step recovery plan. Part 4 outlines a process for implementing the plan in the event of a disaster.

3.         You must be confident that the plan will work.

Once the recovery plan has been developed, it must be tested to ensure it works. Any deficiencies revealed by the test must be corrected by amendments to the plan. Part 5 of this document provides some suggestions for testing your recovery plan.

The plan must be kept up to date as your IT systems change. You should decide how often the plan is to be reviewed (at least once per year should be a minimum) and ensure that the review occurs, e.g. by writing it into the annual plan for your business or entering a date in your diary. The first page of this document has spaces for that information to be entered, and so ensures that the plan is current.