Support > L-Soft Disaster Recovery Plan for ListPlex

L-Soft Disaster Recovery Plan for ListPlex

L-Soft has a disaster recovery plan in the event of a significant disruption to ListPlex. A significant disruption may include a significant disruption for the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The plan outlines the key recovery steps to be performed during and after a disruption so that normal operations can be restored as soon as possible.

Technical recovery will be performed only in the event of a significant disruption. In the event of a disaster, the following customers will be given priority for recovery at the secondary site:

Disaster Recovery priority customers with a dedicated Virtual Machine (VM)
https://www.lsoft.com/products/listplex_dedicated.asp
https://www.lsoft.com/products/listplex_maestro_dedicated.asp

All other hosted customers will be recovered at the secondary site:

After all customers with dedicated VM have been recovered
After primary site IP addresses have been relocated to the disaster recovery site

The specific disaster recovery objectives are to:

Immediately mobilize a core group to assess the technical ramifications of a disruption
Set technical priorities for the recovery team
Minimize the impact of the disruption to the impacted features and priority customers (dedicated VM)
Stage the restoration of operations at the secondary site to full processing capabilities
Enable rollback operations once the disruption has been resolved

There are significant dependencies between and supporting technical groups within and outside L-Soft. This plan is to coordinate with customers to enable their own recovery. The plan is not intended to outline all the steps or recovery procedures that customers need to take in the event of a disruption, or in the recovery from a disruption.

The overall DR strategy of L-Soft International, Inc. is summarized in the table below. These scenarios and strategies are consistent across the technical layers (user interface, reporting, etc.)

A disaster recovery event can be broken out into three phases, the response, the resumption and the restoration.

Response Phase: The immediate actions following a significant event

On call personnel paged
Decision made around recovery strategy to be taken
Full recovery team identified
For a short outage, priority customers are contacted and will decide if they want to recover or wait

Resumption Phase: Activities necessary to resume services after team has been notified

Recovery procedures implemented
Coordination with other departments executed as needed

Restoration Phase: Tasks taken to restore service to previous levels

Rollback procedures implemented
Operations restored

Response Phase

The following are the activities, parties and items necessary for a disaster recovery response in this phase.

Step	Components
Identify issue, page on call/designated responsible individual	Issue communicated/escalated Priority set
Identify the team members needed for recovery	Selection of core team members required for restoration phase from among the following groups: Operations Technical Support
Communicate the specific recovery roles and determine which recovery strategy will be pursued	Documentation/tracking of timelines and next decisions Estimation of the duration of the primary site outage based on preliminary analysis Creation of disaster recovery event command center/"war room" as needed Contact priority customers (based on customer's SLA) to decide if customer wants failover to secondary site

Resumption Phase

During the resumption phase, the steps taken to enable recovery will vary based on the type and duration of the issue. If decision is made to monitor primary site recovery only, then the disaster recovery team will:

Track progress of primary site recovery
Recalculate estimated completion based on current progress
Send periodic updates to core stakeholders

Otherwise, the disaster recovery team will execute the following steps:

Step	Components
Initiate Failover	Restoration procedures identified Risks assessed for each procedure Coordination points between groups defined Issue communication process and triage efforts established
Complete Recovery	Recovery executed, including handoffs between key dependencies
Test Recovery	Tests assigned and performed Results summarized and communicated to group
Failover deemed successful	Communication sent to priority stakeholders New Bethesda IP address identified Customer asked to change its DNS

Restoration Phase

During the restoration phase, the disaster recovery team will execute the following steps:

Step	Components
Determine when failback to original data center will be pursued	Restoration procedures determined
Original data center restored	Schedule determined
Complete Failback	Failback steps executed, including handoffs between key dependencies
Test Failback	Tests assigned and performed Results summarized and communicated to group Issues (if any) communicated to group
Determine whether failback was successful	Declaration of successful failback and communication to priority stakeholders to restore original DNS entries Message on lsoft.com for restored operations Results summarized, post mortem performed and disaster recovery plan updated (as needed)