| | June 20156CIOReviewK12 Enterprise: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning By Steve Langford, CIO, Beaverton School DistrictIn the early hours of August 30, 2013, the Beaverton School District data center fire suppression system explosively deployed into the room. Over half of the hard drive based storage was destroyed. This event occurred on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, with 51 schools in the District set to begin the school year just 4 days after the event.Restoration of systems and data took weeks of work by staff in IT, HR and the Business Office. One key learning from our disaster was that while IT had an existing Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, it was outdated and no longer a viable resource documenting the steps to recover data and systems from a catastrophic data center event. IN MY OPINIONAdditionally, other departments did not have plans to address their continued operations in the event of a disaster, pandemic, or loss of critical technology systems.After passage of a bond including investments for technology modernization, we had the financial resources needed to address and improve our Disaster Recovery plan. Rather than just focus on IT systems and services, we decided to expand the scope from simply a DR plan within IT and include Business Continuity Planning (BCP), encompassing all departments and schools.A Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plan looks across the organization into all learning and business units to create plans for operation in the event of a disaster. While the Disaster Recovery portion of the plan focuses on how IT will continue to provide services. Business Continuity planning examines the practices and functions of schools and departments to ensure continued operation during a disaster with potential impact to work facilities, staff availability, or access to data and systems.Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning is complex and not an undertaking we were willing to begin without outside expertise. We engaged with a firm specializing in the creation of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans. As this work would involve many staff from across the organization, an early step was to work with the senior leadership team to build understanding and support for the need and value-add of the process.Our first steps involved meetings with all departments and schools. The purpose of this Business Impact Analysis (BIA) phase was to identify all existing processes for accomplishing tasks, systems utilized, and document the work done by staff. The goals were to document all processes and begin to understand the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for the systems staff rely upon to do their work.The RTO is the amount of time agreed upon to restore a Steve Langford
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