Margaret
Just a thought – rather than create a ‘Disaster Recovery Plan’, how about creating a ‘Business Continuity Plan’ (BCP)?
My view is that ‘disasters’ seldom strike, but ‘business as usual’ quite often gets disrupted one way or another (think of COVID, widespread ‘flu, power outages etc – none of them ‘disastrous’, but all of them likely to upset normal routine). A BCP is much more useful than a Disaster Recovery Plan, and is actually pretty easy to write as it simply describes what constitutes your normal routines – ie who does what, where, when, why and how – and thus sets out precisely what you need to get, have or regain to re-achieve normality.
An annex to the BCP can then be a list of the most likely threats to ‘business continuity/business as usual’. I have always reckoned them to be the ‘Five Effs’: fire, flood, fraud (financial and cyber), ‘flu (eg pandemics) and ‘feft’!
This leads to a (Business) Risk Management assessment, which is simply you putting these threats in priority order of likelihood and of effect, were nothing done to prevent them happening or to limit their effect if prevention failed (in the jargon ‘they were unmitigated’)..
Your Risk Management Plan then details what you will do to prevent those perceived risks happening and mitigate their potential effects if they did.
Nick Stiven
clerk@stjohnswilton.org.uk