Tips on Creating an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

A well-structured disaster recovery plan is a non-negotiable component of modern business strategy.

Even small mom-and-pop businesses need to manage and store electronic data, which is essential for their everyday business operations, and everyone wants to believe that theirs is safe and secure.

Natural disasters can and do occur, and don’t forget about cyber-attacks—suddenly, your data services are interrupted. When this happens, your business operations can come to a grinding halt.

Thankfully for your organization, you can mitigate this risk by structuring your team for effective disaster recovery. But how do you create an effective disaster recovery plan? We’ll look at what’s commonly included in a disaster recovery plan, along with some tips to help you get started creating an effective strategy.

What To Include in a Disaster Recovery Plan

Even though every business is different, most have similar disaster recovery plans (DRPs) in place. Before looking at what to include in your plan, remember to keep it available to all employees. 

The plan should also be easily understandable, even for employees without IT degrees. Remember, after a disaster, you can never predict who will eventually be working on recovering the data.

To help guide your efforts, here are some of the aspects you should consider in your disaster recovery plan:

• Consider your goals, which should include the maximum amount of downtime, how much data you can afford to lose, and a recovery time.

• Create a comprehensive backup procedure, along with steps on how to recover the backed-up information.

• A complete IT inventory list, which is the list of software and hardware, should also be listed in order of critical importance and how each application is used.

• The responsibilities of your staff. For example, who is responsible for each stage of the disaster recovery process?

• If you have a secondary backup site, this information should be included in the DRP.

• How to respond to an emergency and limit any potential damage.

• An estimation of the time it will take to recover from a disaster, although note that the time may differ for a natural disaster compared to a cyber-attack.

• Procedures that are necessary to restore lost data and systems so the business can return to normal.

• Testing and training of the DRP regularly. Involve all personnel associated with the DRP in this stage. 

Tips on Creating an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

Get to Know Your IT Resources

You probably depend on your IT department or other knowledgeable personnel to operate and maintain your resources and infrastructure. However, creating an effective disaster recovery plan is impossible if you’re currently unfamiliar with your IT resources.

Spend some time auditing your IT resources so you know what is vital for normal business operations and what is nice to have.

What are Your Critical Operations

Hopefully, you never experience a disaster, but they are becoming more common. Finding out what needs protection before a disaster will make getting everything back up and running easier.

Some components that are often considered critical for smooth operations include your network equipment, software, hardware, and your stored data. If you’re currently using cloud services, add this to your list of critical operations. These are the areas you want to protect and focus on restoring as soon as possible.

Analyze the Most Likely Disruptors to Your Business

Knowing what your greatest potential threats are will help make it much easier to create a successful DRP. If you live in an area prone to hurricanes and storms, power failures may be your biggest threat, and other businesses may face threats from potential hackers. Take the time out to work with your staff to identify all of your biggest risks.

Assign Staff Responsibilities

If no one knows for sure what their role and responsibilities are in a disaster, getting your business back to full operations will be a long and frustrating experience. 

Assign each team member a specific role and responsibility to minimize any confusion, which also helps ensure every aspect of the recovery plan is covered. You’ll also want to stress the importance of good communication between various team members.

Some recovery steps can be overlooked or even performed twice when communication isn’t strong or is actively lacking, which ultimately wastes valuable time that could be used to restore operations.

Make Data Recovery a Priority

Your business runs on data, which applies to any business regardless of the industry. Your staff may want to get the lights on, but let the generators handle this, at least until your data is recovered.

The generator can power the lights until the electric company takes over, but your business is at a standstill until your data is back. Hopefully, your team is performing regular data backups to make this process a little easier.

Use Remote Data Storage Solutions

Is your company keeping everything on site? If so, this can present a problem. If a disaster occurs, restoring the lost data can be more difficult, and even backups may not be enough to get everything back.

Using an off-site data storage solution effectively ensures you can restore your information after a disaster. Public cloud technology and private data storage providers are another great option to consider.

Offsite data storage is also an effective way of keeping your data safe in the event your internal systems are infected with malware. While you can keep the infected systems offline, it’s not always feasible for organizations running off of data. You can access the data with remote storage without worrying about spreading the malware to uninfected systems.

Run Your Disaster Recovery Plan

After creating your DRP, the next step is to run a test. You don’t want to learn that it's not effective after a disaster. Some of the things to look for during the test include if there are any points of failure. Think: if one step fails, will the plan continue to function?

Take a look at the recovery time and how much data is lost. Is this acceptable for your business operations, or are improvements necessary? You also want to plan for more than one type of disaster, so try to determine if your DPR can handle weather and manmade disasters.

You Can Recover From a Disaster with the Right Plan

Disaster can strike at any moment, and the best thing you can do to mitigate its effect is to plan properly ahead of time. An effective disaster recovery plan will hopefully help get your business back up and running with little interruption to operations.  

Take your time creating the DRP, and always run tests for different scenarios. Also, don’t forget to always back up your data.