IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Mapping Business Functions to Infrastructure

This chapter should help business people better understand technology. On the other hand, technology people can use this chapter to better understand why business people don't know more about technology.

Technology people, I have something to say to you: Disaster recovery planning isn't about the technology. It's about the business.

This chapter explains mapping business functions to the infrastructure and vice versa. You should know the principles and procedures related to this mapping because DR plans are business-process-centric. Align specific DR plans to business processes. IT systems don't make the business run—business processes do! You need to fully understand which information systems support which business processes. When you know which systems support the most critical business processes, you can take the next step—developing specific DR plans for recovering the right IT infrastructure in the right way, so that you can recover those business processes.

In order to develop DR plans for your IT systems, you need to know what your IT systems currently consist of. Makes sense, right? But a large number of organizations don't have a good grip on what actually makes all their systems work. (If you're in this category, you're in the right place—and I won't tell anyone.)

To begin, you first need to find out what inventory information exists for all of your IT hardware and software, and what applications people use in various ...