Disaster Recovery - Application Prioritization

[Gabbi]

Hi,

Can anyone help me with the below mentioned requirement about how to choose application prioritization for Disaster Recovery ?

How we would prioritize which applications need to be brought up first in the disaster recovery solution. Is there some criteria that we can use to rank applications? And how would we group the recovery of the applications ?

Thanks in advance.
Gabbi

[Bill Pedersen]

Gabbi:

The question is really straight forward:

What application(s) do you need to run the business?

The business needs to make money to survive so you need to be able ship product or deliver services, bill for the work product being delivered. So if there is an ERP system or some other core business application suite this is the primary function that needs to be targeted for recovery.

Now that the company can continue to make money you have to make sure you have product to ship or that you can continue schedule services for delivery. So if there is a MES supporting manufacturing then this is next in line. Or if it is services you might have some service/resource management application that is crucial to the operation of the company. This gives you a secondary priority item.

The analysis now needs to shift to what applications are necessary to support the primary and secondary recovery objectives we identified above, for instance is the EDI to support orders and payments? Is there some other form of vendor/customer communications (a FAX system)? Is there some form of internal communications system or call management system for monitoring customer support? These start coming in at this level.

And the process continues.

The grouping of applications is probably best by platform. If there are similar platforms used for applications and they are implemented in a similar fashion then you might group them together. If there are applications which are all communicating with a given database then that is another way of grouping.

Hope this helps.

Good luck with starting your DR Plan. Keep it up to date and evaluate it on a regular basis - both by review and by controlled execution.

Bill.

[altairconseil]

Hi Gabbi,
A Business Impact Analysis could help you to set the application prioritization. IT users need to get highly involved in this kind of analysis. Main criteria usually evaluated in the BIA matrix : Turnover & Sales Loss, QoS, Reputation, Legal, Social & Environmental, Infrastructure damages. Hope it can help you. Bruno.