Implement Disaster Recovery Processes - Restoration

Implement Disaster Recovery Processes

Restoration

The ultimate goal of the response action is to resume full normal operations. The process to achieve this goal might include the following:

• Returning to the primary operating site; creating a new primary operating site. When the cause of the contingency has passed or been resolved, personnel will need to be returned to a primary operating situation (both a physical and logical location).

This might take the form of returning the organization's original production location/environment or by creating a new one (many organizations that have suffered disaster-level events and used an alternate site/system for maintaining critical operations have ended up making the alternate site into the new primary site and abandoned the original primary).

• Restoring data to the production environment. This process involves a high degree of risk: importing the original backup archive and record of transactions created during the contingency can result in damaging impact to all three: the archive, the contingency record, and the operational environment. Great care and planning should be involved in this process.

The timing of restoration can result in a massive impact to the organization as well. Returning to primary operations too soon (if the danger related to the contingency has not been resolved) can risk harm to health and human safety or, of lesser concern, to the organization's operations.

Staying in contingency operations too long can have a grave financial/personnel impact to the organization (alternate operations are expensive; also, keeping non-productive people - all the non-essential personnel on the payroll for extended periods is not cost-effective, and not paying non-essential personnel during the contingency risks them leaving the organization to find new work and the organization not having a full staff upon return to normal operating conditions. The decision of when to return to normal operations must be made by senior management - often the head of the organization.