hi today we're going to talk about planning for disaster recovery in ServiceNow house business continuity management I'm currently logged into the ServiceNow at Scott Hall Scott Hall is a business continuity disaster recovery manager at this organization and Scott can go into the admin dashboard and see the planned status of all business continuity dr crisis management plans across the organization he can also use the user dashboard to see any business continuity plans or dr plans that are currently within his scope and he can use the my plans tab here to drill into those that he specifically accountable for you can see that Scott has a plan called the application Z disaster recovery plan that is currently in an approved State let's use that plan today for our demo okay so we're in the application Z disaster recovery plan you can see that here's my fictitious company for the demo that plan is this assigned to an apartment a department which is the information technology department and it is for an application application Z that is hosted at this particular data center charlie has the overall authority to approve the plan scott is the owner of the plan and Janis and in this case this admin had the ability to go in and modify any of the areas of the plan that currently need to be documented the status of the plan is currently in an approved state you can see the date and the time that the plan was last approved this plant has to be updated it looks like two times a year every 180 days and you can see this is the due date based on the last time that the plan needed to be reviewed and approved the summary tab allows you to document what the purpose of the plan is in this case this application recovery plan is for application Z and it is an important application it is the core customer facing application for Acme any plan notes can be documented here by simply clicking edit notes any attachments very common in disaster recovery plans to make attachments to the plan like architectural diagrams or asset information that might be in spreadsheet format any of those attachments can be added here comments can be passed back and forth between plan contributors the employees lists any plan any employees that need to be notified as a result of the activation of the plan or and/or these employees might be involved in recovery efforts and assigned to recovery tasks the use of groups is an area where you can leverage IT groups in this case that have already been established on the ITSM in the ITSM functionality within ServiceNow these groups might be database teams sysadmin teams network teams any of those teams can be leveraged using the ServiceNow business continuity management solution and pulled into the scope of the plan and then those groups can be assigned to tasks the applications are lists of application CIS that may or may not come directly from the CMDB and that will help define which applications are in scope for this plan take note that application Z is one of those applications but velocity grid which might be a reporting application or maybe a middleware application that is part of the overall delivery of the functionality of the applications the application multiple applications can be added into the scope of one single plan and you can see each one of those has its own separate recovery time objective and achievable recovery time hardware is going to list any server CIS or any hardware CIS that are available in the CMDB those optimally those CIS would be related to the application C is in the CMDB but this is going to give you a good picture of all the various hardware components that are required to recover this application at an alternate site the recovery tasks are those tasks step by step chronological tasks that need to be completed to recover the application add an alternate site and you can see that some of those tasks might be done in parallel and you can mark those off as well also take note of the fact that each one of the tasks is assigned to individuals or teams or groups that either have already been established in ITSM as affer mentioned or through the creation of teams in the business continuity management solution and ServiceNow vital records an IT might be floor maps in the data center it could be run books for recovery it could also be in quite often is the location of backup tapes or backups that need to be part of your overall recovery effort included as part of the effort any vendors that are required to restore the application to the DR site for example there might be binaries or application layer code that needs to be retrieved from those vendors to be able to restore the application into the DR environment the location is going to allow you to document both the production and dr location of any systems that would need to be recovered obviously into the dr data center recovering workstations or any workstations that are specifically required to recover applications at an alternate site sometimes this is applicable from a mainframe perspective to use certain systems that can gain access into the mainframe telecommunications is any telecommunications capabilities and/or assets like circuits or wide area network or a local area network circuitry that would be pertinent to the recovery effort and last is the non-standard resources this could be anything from a paper or a pencil or anything you can think of that would be required to have a successful recovery at an alternate site and of course all this rolls back to the dashboard where again you can see the overall status of the plan and whether or not that is in in progress they currently submitted for approval in an approved state or has been returned by the plan owner or approver back to those individuals for more clarification and more documentation that's required in the plan so in closing we've talked about three different benefits of disaster recovery planning and service now business continuity management the first is to minimize your overall risk exposure the second is to optimize those resources that you need for the recovery efforts and the third is to increase the speed of overall application recovery for more information on business continuity management check out the solution page at service and hakam thank you and have a nice day