IBM SC34-7012-01 manual Disaster recovery, Why have a disaster recovery plan?

Chapter 19. Disaster recovery

If your CICS system is normally available about 99 percent of the time, it would be wise to look at your disaster recovery plan. The same pressure that drives high availability drives the need for timely and current disaster recovery.

You must plan what level of disaster recovery you require for your CICS environment. If you are using DB2 or IMS, you can read more specific details related to database recovery in the following publications:

vDB2 for z/OS Administration Guide, for DB2 database recovery

vIMS Operations Guide, for IMS database recovery

See also the ITSC Disaster Recovery Library: Planning Guide for information that should help you set up a detailed disaster recovery plan if you use a combination of databases, such as DB2 and IMS.

Why have a disaster recovery plan?

If your business cannot continue to function without CICS, you must have a disaster recovery plan.

To build a disaster recovery plan you must take into account a number of items unique to disaster recovery:

vWhat data is vital to my business?

vHow long can the data be unavailable?

vHow current does the data need to be?

vWhat is the cost of a disaster to my company?

vWhat is the cost of my disaster recovery plan?

vIs performance after a disaster a consideration?

vWhat type of disaster is possible, or even likely, and how long will it affect my system?

You might consider some, or all, of your CICS applications as vital to the operations of your business. If all applications are vital, you need to recover all the data that your CICS systems use. If only some of your applications are vital, you have to determine what data is associated with those applications.

The length of time between the disaster and recovery of your vital applications is a key factor. If your business cannot continue without access to your CICS data, your disaster recovery plan must take this into account.

The time-sensitive nature of your recovered data can be an overriding factor. If your vital application is a high volume, high change application, recovering week-old data may not be acceptable—even hour-old data may be unacceptable. You may need to recover right up to the point of the disaster.

The type of disaster from which you plan to recover can determine where your disaster recovery site is located. If you foresee only fire and water damage to your computer floor, a disaster recovery site in the building next door may be

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