Prework Before Updating ITDR

The following are questions to consider and data to gather in advance of making your updates in CardinalShield ITDR. Having this data in advance will streamline your data entry into CardinalShield ITDR.

Key questions and data

By following these steps, you can efficiently use CardinalShield ITDR to create and maintain comprehensive disaster recovery plans, ensuring preparedness and resilience for your IT infrastructure.

WORKFLOW STEPS	SUMMARY OF DATA BEING GATHERED
Administrative	Who is responsible for filling out the DR Plan as the owner? What school/unit, department/organization, and group/team/division are you part of? What is the name of the service/application? Which deployment model are you using? Did you read through Part A?
Scope	What are the name(s) of the services and/or applications in scope of this DR Plan?
Vendor Information	What is the name of the vendor you are using?
Service Infrastructure	Is there a non-production environment available for this service? Are there any general assumptions or dependencies for this service? What are the production hardware/VM details for this service? What are the DR hardware/VM details for this service?
Recovery Team Resources	Who from your team is responsible for the recovery of a service when it goes down? What role(s) will the team responsible for this service play? What skill set does the team need to have? Who are the primary and secondary contacts for this service? Do you have the primary contact's email and phone numbers? Does your team have a link to an on-call schedule? Do you have your vendors/suppliers' contact information name, email, phone number, website, and contract number?
Outage Notifications, Escalations, Monitoring & Communications	What monitoring tools are being used? What team is responsible for monitoring alerts? Are alerts being monitored 24/7, or on another cadence? How are alerts being communicated to the team responsible for monitoring? Are there any special communications and service level considerations?
Recovery	What is this service's RTO? What is this service's RPO? Does this service have data backup implemented? What are the recovery steps for this service, such as process name, process details, process owner, estimated time for recovery?
Scenarios	What scenarios from the list are applicable to your service? What are the steps/instructions for each applicable scenario?
Testing, Drills, and Maintenance	How often are testing or DR exercises done? How often are regular maintenance, patching, and server reboots done?
Closing Steps and Approval Setup	Are there any additional comments related to the recovery of this service that you would like to reference that were not captured in other sections? Is there any other supporting documentation that would help with the recovery process that you would like to add?
Local Approval	Have you completed the DR plan to the best of your knowledge and with the most current updates and are you ready to sign off for completion?
Closing Approval	This section will be completed by the IT Resilience team.