Creating A Disaster Recovery Plan For Protecting Your Business

Want to protect your business against unexpected disasters?
Wondering how to create a disaster recovery plan for your organization?

We are here to help. In this blog, we explain the detailed process of creating a disaster recovery plan for your business. Understand the different factors that affect a disaster, how to resume operations, and what disaster recovery methods to use.

Let’s start by understanding what exactly is a disaster recovery plan.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan or DR plan details the steps to recover business operations after a disaster. The DR plan covers natural and man-made disasters like power outages, earthquakes, tornadoes, landslides, and cyber attacks.

A disaster recovery plan is a necessity for businesses, not a luxury. Whether you are a startup or an enterprise, you need to understand what is disaster recovery. DR planning is essential to protect your data. The IT disaster recovery plan will help you assess risk and prioritize your assets.

Let’s discuss what a DR plan covers and how to create your own disaster recovery plan.

Why Do You Need DR Plan For Your Organization?

Disaster recovery is an important aspect of any business. As we all know disasters can happen anytime to anyone. But it is the responsibility of business owners to be prepared for such unexpected events. By taking precautions and planning ahead, you can ensure minimal disruption is caused.

Some important reasons why you need a disaster recovery plan are –

1. Service Disruption and Customer Loss– Without a DR plan, your business operations will come to a halt.
2. Loss of Revenue– You can lose a lot of money in getting your business back on track. Additionally, while you are recovering your operations, you can’t provide your products. This will critically affect your sales.
3. Brand Image– As a company, you want to maintain trust and assurance with your customers, partners, and employees. Your preparedness to handle unexpected disasters will increase your brand trust and solidify your image.

5 Steps To Create Your Own Disaster Recovery Plan

So you want a disaster recovery plan in place for your business. But not sure where to start planning?

You can hire disaster recovery company to take care of your organization’s disaster recovery process. Or you can do the planning in-house, and get storage space from disaster recovery companies.

Whichever option you choose, it is essential to understand how disaster recovery planning works. Here are 5 definitive steps to create a disaster recovery plan-

Step 1- Risk Evaluation

Business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment that takes into account the pertinent possible catastrophes should be the first steps in a disaster recovery strategy. The following are important factors to think about:

• Analyze every aspect of the organization’s functionality. This will help you in identifying potential outcomes, such as data loss or leakage.
• Disaster recovery is an essential part of more comprehensive business continuity planning. Evaluate risks and set appropriate targets.
• Organizations can regain crucial business functions that enable business continuity. While IT teams deal with the disaster by evaluating risks and creating targets.
• A risk analysis will assist you in creating a well-optimized recovery strategy against catastrophes and disasters. Determine the risk variables related to geography and infrastructure.
• You should decide if you require cloud backups, how many backups you require, who has access to the backups, the backup restoration process…etc.

Step 2- Analyze Needs

After completing a risk assessment, you must examine each department’s important requirements. What processes are crucial for business functioning? Set priorities for various operations and processing.

In this stage, you have to define clearly the process to follow. Here are some factors you need to consider-

• IT inventory – list hardware and software assets, their criticality, and whether they are leased, owned, or used a service.
• Accessibility, price, and timeframe for disaster recovery
• IT personnel – Who is in charge of the DR plan? Who will you require to restore functions? What will be the operating hours during such emergencies?
• System evaluation
• An approach to alerting people of system changes
• Hardware specifications needed for essential procedures
• Process of negotiating service extension

Step 3- Set Disaster Recovery Goals

The following important factors to consider while setting disaster recovery goals:

• Make a list of the mission-critical operations that are required for business continuity and then identify which software, data, user accesses, and hardware are required to support them.
• RTO or Recovery Time Object is the maximum downtime allowed for each critical system.
• RPO or Recovery Point Object is the maximum amount of acceptable data loss.
• Define the RTP and RPO for each key asset and process of your organization.
• All of your goals should take into consideration the service level agreements (SLAs) that were guaranteed to each stakeholder, including users and executives.

Step 4- Create a DR Document

Data aids in the development of sensible and pertinent disaster recovery strategies. Key data types to gather at this point include the following:

• Lists include master vendor lists, backup employee job listings, important contact information lists, notification checklists, and master call lists.
• Documentation, microcomputer hardware and software, forms, communications equipment, data center computer hardware, insurance policies, office equipment, workgroup hardware, and off-site storage facility equipment are all included in inventories.
• Schedules – they comprise the times set aside for the backup or storage of software and data files.
• Included in the term “processes” are all stated system recovery or restore procedures.
• Include all temporary disaster recovery locations in your list of locales.
• Include any pertinent inventory, supplies, and listings in your documentation.
• Include this information in a written, documented strategy after organizing it.

Step 5- Review and Test DR Plan

A disaster recovery plan should only be used in theory; to keep it current, it must be tested and revised regularly. Advantages of testing disaster recovery plans –

• Make sure the company has facilities and backup plans that are workable and suitable.
• Determine which parts of the plan need to be modified.
• Educating your staff will help to guarantee that they are ready to carry out the strategy.
• Show the effectiveness of your strategy and the company’s resilience to calamities.

Conclusion

Disaster recovery planning is becoming increasingly crucial for businesses and organizations. A single disaster can ruin years of your and your employee’s work. With the right IT partner, you can devise a full-proof disaster recovery plan for your business.

Want to get professional disaster recovery services?

Contact WPG to schedule a free consultation. We have IT experts who will understand your requirements and offer reliable advice.