Establish and Document the Application's Disaster Recovery Procedures

This chapter explains how to establish and document how an Application is recovered after a disaster that disables its normal operating environment.

Establish Disaster Recovery Procedures

Establish, with the Operations and Support Team(s), Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, and the Business Application Owner, and consistent with the Application’s Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective:

• Recovery strategy: how the Application will be restored, for example by failing over to a standby Instance, rebuilding in an alternate location, or relying on a vendor’s recovery capability.

• Recovery environment: where the Application will run during a disaster, and how that environment is kept ready.

• Recovery procedure: the steps to declare a disaster, recover the Application, verify it, and return to normal operation afterward.

• Recovery order and dependencies: which upstream dependencies must be recovered first, and which downstream Applications depend on this one.

• Roles and contacts: who decides, who acts, and who communicates during a disaster.

Document and Share the Disaster Recovery Procedures

Record the Disaster Recovery procedures in the Operational section of the Application Documentation, and keep a copy accessible in a way that does not depend on the environment that may be lost. Record the Disaster Recovery Instances and how they differ from Production. Testing of Disaster Recovery is addressed in the chapter “Establish and Document the Application’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Testing When Required.” Update the procedures with every Release that changes the Application’s architecture, infrastructure, or dependencies.

Best Practice: Establish and Document the Application’s Disaster Recovery Procedures

It is a best practice to both establish and document the solution for recovering an Application from disaster: define its recovery strategy, environment, procedure, order, and roles in line with its recovery objectives, and keep the documentation accessible even if the primary environment is lost.

Benefits: Documented Disaster Recovery procedures let the enterprise restore critical Applications within the time and data-loss limits the business requires, instead of improvising during a crisis. Keeping them accessible outside the affected environment ensures that the instructions survive the disaster they are meant to address.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices addresses Disaster Recovery readiness across the portfolio. The IT Operating Environments Best Practices addresses mirror environments for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning.