A successful plan is a corporate plan supported by top levels of management and built by specialists with cooperation from workers, supervisors and middle managers. The CIO is the key executive who can coordinate support throughout the levels of the company. Communication and coordination among the various levels of the company are the key elements in building a plan that works. Building the plan provides an opportunity to raise awareness of the process and explain the benefits. Each must be made aware of how a Disaster Recovery Plan helps protect the function, the job, and the company.
Disaster recovery can and does work.
Those that did flourish made it clear from the outset that disaster recovery planning is everyone's job, not just the job of a disaster recovery coordinator or manager. The CIO must accept the mantle of communicating to all levels of management that each must accept responsibility for successful implementation of a plan. The most important tasks in developing a Disaster Recovery Plan are identifying the key corporate functions, the capabilities they need, when they need those capabilities, and how they interact with other functions. From this information the disaster recovery planner can define the objectives of the Disaster Recovery Plan. The first step in building a BIA is to limit the scope and to specify the environment.