When it comes to creating and documenting business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) plans, it's necessary to expend a significant amount of time and effort. One potential way to ease this burden is to use DR and BC templates to help guide you through this process, which provide ready-made formats, layouts and containers for the various types of information you'll need to assemble and record during that process.
Templates can help for everything from risk assessment -- to mapping out the details needed in disaster recovery plans, such as key contacts information, step-by-step service resumption activities, delivery and recovery from off-site data backups and more.
We've compiled our best resources on disaster recovery and business continuity templates for your convenience. Bookmark this page, as we will update it often with new information.
DISASTER RECOVERY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY TEMPLATES: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Using disaster recovery business continuity templates
Business continuity and disaster recovery testing templates: A
free download and guide
Using a business impact analysis (BIA) template
As you use disaster recovery and business continuity planning templates, don't forget to think outside the box. That is, you'll want to make sure you've covered everything that's relevant to your organization's disaster recovery or business continuity efforts, rather than just following somebody's blueprint unthinkingly. That's why a good shakedown from a recovery practice drill is so important to vetting all such plans, whether they derive from a template or not.
In this article, learn about the pros and cons of using disaster recovery and business continuity templates.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY TESTING TEMPLATES
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are useless until you test them. Fortunately, many types of tests are possible, ranging from simple to very complex. The key to business continuity testing success is to incorporate testing as part of the overall business continuity/disaster recovery management process.
But testing can be a major challenge to many organizations. They require management support, time for preparation and execution, funding, careful planning and a structured process from pre-test through test and post-test evaluation.
SearchDisasterRecovery.com has created a free business continuity testing template and guide to show you how to build and execute your test
A BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS TEMPLATE
A business impact analysis is a key part of the business continuity process that analyzes mission-critical business functions, and identifies and quantifies the impact a loss of those functions (e.g., operational, financial) may have on the organization.
SearchDisasterRecovery.com has created a free downloadable business impact analysis template to assist you in your business continuity planning. Download and print out our BIA template, and step-by-step guide to create a successful business impact analysis.
This was first published in August 2009