Mapping out all the preparations necessary for an effective disaster recovery plan and its safeguard?a continuous maintenance program?this guide is aimed at IT managers of small and medium businesses. The opening section covers the initial steps of auditing vulnerability, ranking essential IT functions, and reviewing the storage of tape backups, with the following discussion focused on the elements of the plan itself. The plan includes a mission statement, a definition of disaster, the assignment of staff to teams, methods of compensating for human error, and standards for documenting the steps of recovery. The final portion of the guide covers the all-important initial testing of the system as well as the proper maintenance thereafter and weighs in on the pros and cons of using outside vendors for recovery systems.

Richard Dolewski's profile page

Richard Dolewski is a certified systems integration specialist and disaster recovery planner. He has extensive experience in Server Enterprise Availability, Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP), Business Continuity Planning (BCP), High Availability, and Backup and Recovery program design. Richard has supported 18 computer room disasters and conducted over 200 disaster recovery tests. He is an award-winning speaker at technical conferences including IBM, COMMON, IBM Europe, IT Executive events, Quest, NEMA, and local user groups. Richard has held positions as subject matter expert at IBM and COMMON, a member of the Advisory Committee for IBM Business Resiliency, and president of local user groups. He also regularly contributes to several technical newsletters. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.