Disaster Recovery/Business continuity Process - Related documents for PLC & SCADA

You can do like I saw in a company I worked on that basically said to call this and that guy...

Or you will have to break that down in separate documents, a top level one to point to all the required documents and then for each of the functional systems have a separate document. One for PLC's, one for the large SCADA systems (if present), one for HMI screens and if you are that detailed one other for instrumentation (although this one is hard to create and manage).

I am at the moment looking into this myself and the PLC side is fairly straightforward as you point to a file and how to load it to a processor.

The SCADA bits are far more tricky to do as you can have different platforms and spare parts, etc...
Where I worked previously I was lucky to have enough material available and my strategy to maintain RAID1 servers and normal clients was to move the clients to SSD's where the imaging process took 12 minutes.
On the servers, I had a spare set of functioning hard drives to fit in the server. I would refresh these every so often by connecting them to a laptop, wipe completely, then remove one of the hard drives from the RAID array and fit this one to be rebuilt.
I would then take the hard drive taken and place it in a spare server where the RAID array would be rebuilt.
This made solving issues with a server a breeze. One thing to remember though is that whenever a failure crashed, you could only use one of the hard drives from the RAID array. Some failures would corrupt hard drives and if you fit both, you had no easy spare to work with and had to resort to imaging.
 
I cannot comment on our process, but here's what we did at another plant.

hard drive #1
open to all plc programmers and maintenance.
this is the working drive
It contains the working copies of MMI, HMI, SCADA, plc programs

hard drive #2
Master copy with restricted access.
IS/IT, controls engineer.
this is a copy of drive #1 and is in a separate building.

a file comparison program detects different file names, dates, sizes
between the two drives and creates a log file.
the file is sent to the controls engineer, who does a file comparison for differences and discusses the changes with maintenance.
Legitimate changes remain for a specified time and then made the master copy. temp changes or specification data changes are not allowed and changed back. it all depends on what's going on.

My current plant is way more advanced and I cannot comment on the process.

james
 

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