About the Worksheets
Five of the worksheets are discussed in the book, Network Disaster Recovery: Planning for Business Continuity and System Performance. These worksheets are Excel spreadsheets (created with Microsoft Excel 2000 (9.0.2720)) and can be used as templates to collect the information needed for planning a SHARED disaster avoidance system implementation as discussed in Chapter 3 of the book. The sixth worksheet can be used to conduct a traditional disaster risk assessment and impact analysis for your business, and is discussed in the next section.
SHARED Disaster Avoidance Analysis Worksheets
These worksheets are titled:
- Business Overview
- Financial Analysis
- Data Flow & Technologies
- End User Impact
- Facility Impact
You should first look at each worksheet to familiarize yourself with the information that needs to be collected. If you already have comparable information in another form, by all means use that. It is not required that you complete the worksheets. These are only designed to insure that all the required information is identified and well documented during the analysis, and to provide tools to help you in that effort. If you already have the information, then proceed to the analysis steps outlined in Chapter 5. If you are using the worksheets, read on for more information about them.
The worksheets are designed to allow them to be easily duplicated and expanded to meet the data collection needs of your business and systems architecture. For example, in the Business Overview worksheet, rows equate to facilities or locations. So you simply add rows as required to cover all the areas to be analyzed and the critical applications per location or facility.
In the End User Impact worksheet fill in column headings to represent key functional areas of the business unit that have different disaster recovery needs. Duplicate columns B through F of the worksheet for each individual or category of users.
The Facility Impact worksheets fill in column headings to represent key functional areas of the business unit that have different needs in a disaster. Then complete columns B through D for each functional area.
The Data Flow & Technologies worksheet is used differently. In this worksheet you are defining the relation ship between the applications and access methods between different locations/facilities. Therefore, you expand both the rows and columns, so that each facility/location/critical application is listed both down the rows and across the columns. Then you populate the intersecting cells with access information on how the applications interface with one another. This provides you information on how to collocate the critical applications across various sites and servers and the access required to maintain the collocated sites as described in the book.
The Financial Analysis worksheet is an example of many key components typically used in calculating ROI, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), cost reduction, loss prevention and value add. Note that the formulas per cell as also displayed for ease of use. However, since businesses are so different, you may find that not all the calculations apply to your business and you may also have others that are not listed. Therefore, feel free to modify the worksheet as needed to meet you needs.
Traditional Risk and Impact Worksheet
The sixth worksheet was not covered in detail in the book. It can be used to conduct a traditional disaster risk assessment and impact analysis for your business. It is titled:
- Business Risk Assessment & Impact Analysis
This worksheet contains a long list of questions to help you evaluate how well your business is prepared for a disaster; the impact of a disaster; and in general terms what is needed to recover from the disaster. The questions are listed in the left hand column. Then there are three general sections to the analysis. Business coverage, risk and impact sections are listed across the top of the worksheet. Using the coverage section, you answer questions to determine if the condition is true or false for your business, by answering yes or no in each cell that contains an X. When doing this section, the risk and impact sections are grayed out and have no entries. Other questions, where the coverage section is grayed, are designed to help you determine the risk and potential impact of a specific type of disaster.
Typically you will need to complete one of these worksheets for each facility or location, since many of the questions are area specific. Then you can tally the results across the worksheets to determine where you do not have adequate coverage, where you have risks, and their potential impact. That's as far as the worksheet takes you, then it is up to you to do something proactive to protect your business and insures its continuity in the face of a disaster.