There once was a time when a disaster recovery plan only encompassed natural and manmade disasters. In our current era, the disaster recovery plan also needs to include digital disasters. Most organizations these days find themselves unable to operate if they lose access to their computing systems or the internet. For this reason, disaster recovery plans are no longer a precaution carried out solely by those who live near a fire zone or on earthquake fault lines. To ensure that you can get your organization back into running order as quickly as possible, we’ve put together a list of five steps for building a disaster recovery plan.
In today’s fast-paced world, any downtime experienced by a business or organization could mean catastrophic failure. Whether the downtime is caused naturally by fire or flood, is inflicted by humans through war or terror or involves critical infrastructure such as electricity or internet connectivity doesn’t really matter if the end result is a critical shutdown. The fact is that you need a well-thought-out plan to get your systems back up and running as soon as possible. Waiting until disaster strikes is far too late. So, what are the steps for building a disaster recovery plan?
You need to have a team in place that understands it’s their responsibility to enact and carry out the disaster recovery plan. By creating a team, you’ll have emphasized the importance of their roles both in creating and executing the plan. It leaves no ambiguity as to who is responsible and for what. Even if it’s only a one-person team, at least that person will understand their role.
Your disaster recovery team now needs to brainstorm the types of disasters that could affect the organization and what the impact would be. The various types of disasters should be quantifiably graded according to the severity. This exercise will also identify the systems, structures and personnel that are absolutely necessary to keep the organization functioning.
Once you’ve prioritized the various functions critical to maintaining operations, you need to define the amount of time it will take to get them operating again. You’ll need to assess the maximum downtime each function could acceptably deal with as well as the best-case scenario in getting each element up and running again. This will provide a frame of reference with which to compare when actually implementing the disaster recovery plan.
With the information gained from completing the previous steps, you should now be able to put together your disaster recovery plan. All the steps required to get every critical function of your organization back up and running need to be written down and assigned to responsible parties. This will allow the various tasks to be carried out according to the book while mitigating distraction and second-guessing.
Now that the disaster recovery plan is completed, it needs to be tested and assessed. Testing will help identify any deficiencies or shortfalls. The assessment of your test can help you re-evaluate your plan and change it accordingly. Tests should be done regularly to ensure any organizational changes that affect the plan are dealt with accordingly.
To learn more about implementing a disaster recovery plan for your business, get a free assessment today.
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