Recovering from any disruption requires the right people. When it comes to disaster recovery plan, success will depend on quickly mobilizing a team to maintain business uptime.

Every user in your company can be affected by an incident that is escalated to a disaster. By identifying people you will need to quickly restore operations as part of your planning, ideally your customers won’t be affected because you’ll be able top to bounce back quickly and minimize the disruption to business operations.

Keep disaster recovery reflexes sharp

Your disaster recovery plan should include a management team that takes on the critical responsibilities and decision making, starting with whether the disruption is in fact a disaster.

If it’s concluded that the incident is severe enough to meet the criteria, your disaster recovery team must mobilize and do the following:

• Manage and coordinate the disaster recovery plan
• Activate other staff in the organization, as well as your service provider, in priority—some people may be needed immediately, while others need to be on standby depending the role in the plan
• Ramp up any alternate facilities and secondary sites
• Review the recovery procedures to be activated that will support your recovery objectives

Who should be on the team?

There are several key roles that should be already be assigned by your disaster response management plan before a disruption occurs.

Your information security group should always be represented on your disaster recovery team, as they have specific, specialized responsibilities, including a review of the recovery goals, understanding the magnitude of the damage, and making sure information security procedures are followed by the disaster recovery team. They can also assist with the preparation of an accurate news media statement that outlines a description of the incident, how and when it happened, and who will be affected and how.

Other team members include a disaster recovery coordinator to liaise with your service provider and any vendors that might contribute to the affected infrastructure. Their job should also be to set up a schedule for status updates throughout the recovery process right up until full restoration.

Another important role you must fill is that of a disaster recovery crisis manager, whose job it is to keep everyone informed on latest developments and be a single point of contact for all team members. They have several critical responsibilities, including:

• Making sure all users and are familiar with the disaster recovery management plan.
• Provisioning additional telephone lines for extra staff if needed.
• Getting a snapshot of activities in progress when the disruption happened from the information security team, an estimate as to how long these activities will be delayed, and when the next update can be expected.
• Developing a public statement approved by disaster response management team that can be distributed to everyone affected, including customers and users, as well as media. Multiple statements may be required, including one when the recovery operation is done, and regular business activities have resumed.

Having a well-thought disaster response management plan in place will only be effective if the right people there are to executive as soon as the alert is sounded. You should frequently revisit your plan to confirm the people assigned to these critical roles understand their responsibilities and that they are still available should disaster strike.

If you haven’t begun to think about disaster recovery planning or feel your plan needs an update, check out our Disaster Recovery Primer.