Disaster Recovery Primary Site Restoration: Home Sweet Home

Optimization Point

The primary focus of Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) and efforts is to minimize revenue loss and the impact on business operations and customers. This is achieved by recovering disrupted IT systems and services at the recovery site as quickly as possible. However, when building the DRP, planners may put the bottom line at risk by overlooking the transition back to the primary site.

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Without advance planning for return to the primary site, costs related to maintaining operations at the recovery site will continue to accrue, driving up the total cost of the disruption. Making primary site restoration part of the DRP ensures that the rebuilding and repatriating activities are initiated without undue delay, and the cost associated with operating under emergency conditions will be minimized.

The cost of continuing operations at the disaster recovery (DR) site is a factor of:

Employing inefficient manual or non-standard interim processes at the recovery site.
Replacing critical staff lost due to the disaster.
Cost of the availability and performance of service levels.
Cost of housing employees in DR site locations.
Loss of customers or market share due to inability to fully service.
Additional vendor licensing and contract costs.
Inability to deliver on strategic initiatives resulting in lost business opportunities.
Loss of reputation due to inability to fulfill contracts.

Key Considerations

Running operations in emergency mode is fraught with distractions, issues, and practices that may not measure up to the organizations normal IT best practices. The result can be added complexity when planning the repatriation. DR planners can avoid major pitfalls by following these guidelines when planning the transition to restore normal IT operations at the primary site.

Continue to do all system and data backups at the recovery site. Loss of data will make it much more difficult to re-establish systems and re-launch operations at the primary site.
Ensure that all data and access controls are secure. The transition period for the move provides opportunities for unauthorized access to either the data or premises, which can be avoided by continuing to enforce IT and physical security policies.
Keep documentation current and available. Ensure that all documentation is on hand or can be reproduced quickly and replace vendor documentation where required. Operations are easier to resume when complete documentation is available.
Test and certify the primary site. Build a solid test plan and conduct thorough user acceptance testing to certify that the primary site is ready to go live after transitioning data and services.
Validate the status of contracts. Ensure that all contracts and licenses are current at the primary site. Seat and site licenses may need to be updated depending on the new configuration of the primary site. Renegotiate rates and terms where possible or necessary.
Learn from the event. Conduct a post mortem review of the entire disaster event from detection to repatriation and document what worked, what did not work and lessons learned. Use these to update the DRP processes, including the repatriation plan. Test the updated plans as soon as it is feasible.

Improvement & Optimization

The Restoration Team is responsible for the rebuilding and repatriation activities. The team should operate from a command center accessible to the primary site in order to manage the rebuilding tasks and oversee the progress of the plan. There are three phases associated with transitioning operations back to the primary site:

Phase 1: Rebuild

Depending on the severity of the damage, repairing the original site can vary from replacing a few servers to rebuilding or even relocating the site or facility. The rebuilding activities could last for days, weeks, or months until the site or system is fit for restoring normal operations.

Goal: To restore the primary site facilities and infrastructure to full operational capability.

Procedures:

Conduct a primary site assessment	The primary site assessment determines the extent of repairs required to get back to full operations. Take an inventory of the damage to pre-existing facilities and infrastructure to determine the rebuild or replacement requirements.
Consider the opportunity to upgrade	Identify improvements, risks or other issues that were previously unaddressed during prior operations. For example, relocating the primary site farther from the recovery site, implementing server virtualization, improving fire detection capability, or strengthening access controls.
Update contracts and licenses	Renegotiate vendor contracts and licenses and plan upgrades to more current systems or hardware. Incorporate these plans in the repatriation plan.
Create a repatriation plan	Include an inventory of required IT assets, services, documentation, fixtures, furniture, and office supplies for all rebuilt, upgraded or new components and facilities. Also, include costs, timelines, resource allocations, and testing requirements. The Repatriation Plan should include a full user acceptance test plan to certify that the primary site is ready.

Outcome: The primary site has been rebuilt including infrastructure upgrades and modifications to allow for the resumption of normal IT operations.