Disaster Plan

In order to sustain a continuous business operation it is extremely important to have in place a disaster recovery plan. A disaster recovery plan has all of the key resources set into place to ensure that the recovery pan incorporates and prepares all individuals, places and systems that will be affected to ensure certain steps will be followed to restore all computer systems. This will also ensure that all backup of data is available at the time the disaster occurs. The Miller Group must make sure that if a disaster were to occur the company would be able to restore its systems at the minimum amount of cost.

The first step in the process is to analyze what needs to be done to the existing system in order to apply changes to the existing configuration to make the setup in order to restore the system at a time of failure. Currently the Miller Group has T1 leased circuits that connect to all offices. A T3 circuit is used to provide internet connectivity to all employees. There are 8 dedicated presentation servers setup to all employees. There are 2 database servers that maintain all data warehousing services and 5 Application servers provide all business system functionality. The problem with the existing system setup is that it does not have set in place a redundant system array that can continue to keep the system up and functioning during a power outage, surge or system component failure. It would also be important to take into account the need for in house technical support and network specialists to recover damaged computers or lost data on server hard drives that are in place in the central offices data center. When a computer network is down, it is estimated that costs can run into the millions of dollars for each hour that the computer systems are down. This again will also depend upon the gross daily income of the company. The value of data can be significant; if data is permanently lost it could bankrupt the Miller Group organization. During the time in which the attempt to recover data is underway and an individual is unable to access his or her PC, this would reduce productivity which in turn would impact the Miller Groups sales and profitability. If there is a computer support specialist employed within the company, both the number of hours needed to recover the data and the cost of employing this individual should be taken into account for the Miller Group. With research done on the website payscale.com it reports that the average computer support specialist currently earns $27.60 an hour, including salary and benefits. Assuming that the average time that is needed to recover the lost data is about 8 hours, the cost of using an in house employee to recover lost data would be around $350. Taking into account if the data can be retrieved in-house or would need to be sent to data recovery specialists, the expected average cost to retrieve data outside the company would be in the expected range to be anywhere between $1,000 to $2500.

To establish an effective systems recovery process it is imperative that the order in which the systems are to be restored are placed within their proper categories. This is to reduce confusion for the technical teams involved in the process of restoring all systems and connectivity. The first approach to the organizations recovery would be to find out if it is data or and application / applications that are affecting the organization. If the issue is a data failure this would be categorized as a business critical recovery process. The most important thing to establish before a disaster occurs is to have set in place a RAID 1 data array. This array involves 2 or more hard drives that copy the data that is being utilized at the time before the drive fails. If the primary drive were to fail the other drives with the same information copied to