UW Emergency Management

June 24, 2018

Build your Husky Ready Plan in a Year: Month 6

This post is part of a 2018 series breaking the process of business continuity planning for University of Washington departments into monthly tasks to help build a plan in a year. 

This month we will capture the details about your technology dependencies–both those with central IT and those managed entirely within your team. Next month we will take this information and address the process of restarting and work from home. The reason for breaking it out over two months is to separate the process of collecting data from the process of exploring the ways to restart IT systems and prepare for outages.

Build your plan in a year: Month 6 (4.5 Hours)

Step One: What UW-IT Applications Support Your Work? (30 Minutes)

  • UW-IT provides a number of central applications that are used by teams to complete their day to day work. For the purposes of this work you can include all applications you use, or focus only on those applications that support your identified critical functions.
  • To add a function, go to “Central Applications” under “Information Technology.” Click the “add central application” button which will give you a pop up to fill out. You will select a central application from the drop down, and provide details about how you use the application, level of criticality to your operations, and how long it can be offline before you face significant outages

Step Two:  What Department Applications are you Using? (90 Minutes)

  • Many departments purchase or license applications, programs and software themselves and not through the central UW-IT offerings. Some of these are just as essential, if not sometimes more  crucial, to operations as central UW-IT applications.
  • Capture these key applications on “Department Applications” under “Information Technology.” Gather as much information as possible in this section. You do not have to answer every question, but the more you include, the better it will be for the person who picks up and tries to implement your plan. If the product requires log in, tell users where to find that information. If it requires a license key, include that here.

Step Three: Detail your servers (1 hour)

  •  For some departments this section might be blank; for others it may be a lengthy list of research back up and database support. The purpose of listing your servers is to get a sense of priority for restoration and to assign a responsible party to bring the server back online.
  • Add Servers to “Servers” under “Information Technology”

Step Four: How do you preserve your data (90 minutes)

  • How you save your data and which data is the most important to you is essential to restoring operations. By backing up data, knowing where data is saved, and knowing which data is of greatest interest to you, you can prioritize recovery and quickly get to work on restoration.
  • Add backup information to “Workstations” under “Information Technology.”
  • In the comments, include specific folders or data pieces that are of most importance to restoration of operations. It can be much faster to restore specific pieces of data instead of all data.
  • Include the contact information–names and details–for anyone who supports you in maintaining and restoring data.

This month you have captured the details about what you have and what you use. Next month we will reflect on this information and begin the process of identifying how best to cope with technology loss, and how to get processes up and running again.