Disaster recovery (commonly referred to as DR) is a critically important concept related to business continuity. The principles governing disaster recovery have continuously evolved over the last decade, culminating in a set of universally accepted standards and practices that successfully guide businesses through any type of disaster.
To this day, the concept of disaster recovery is powerfully influenced by cutting-edge trends within the business realm and IT industry.
In its most elemental form, disaster recovery plans are an integral part of any successful business plan; used as a reference blueprint to determine the optimal strategies to be undertaken to get businesses back into a pre-disaster state in quick, efficient, and effective manner.
It’s crucial to note that business continuity cannot exist without the inclusion of disaster recovery planning. In these technological times, threats to business continuity continue to expand, from the ever-evolving sophisticated techniques of hackers to the prevalence of natural disasters such as snowstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes and other catastrophic events that can gravely impact businesses.
The multitude of contemporary threats that businesses face can include such things as extended down times, rendering various aspects of a business to an “out-of-commission” status, and can ultimately create consumer distrust as well as cause the loss of revenue.
Disaster recovery planning is fundamental to the success of any business or organization relying on IT-based infrastructure. The imperativeness of developing a high-quality recovery plan is intrinsic, particularly in a world fraught with innumerable threats to security but also the existence of formidable competitors readily able to take advantage of rival companies contending with threat mitigation.
In years past, disaster recovery plans were far more elementary in scope and stand in stark contrast to the comprehensive, multi-dimensional recovery plans implemented by businesses and organizations today.
Businesses and organizations can no longer rely on the basic, minimalist recovery plans of yesteryear. Investing in the development of all-inclusive, far-reaching recovery plans is among the most prudent decisions anyone can make to ensure the future success and overall sustainability of any institution.
To learn more about the essential steps involved in crafting a dynamic disaster recovery plan, read on below.
Step by Step Guide to Creating a Dynamic Disaster Plan
1 . Understand the Basics – The creation of a disaster recovery plan commences with making the necessary determinations of which business aspects are most important to initially address to prioritize requirements to get the IT components of those functions operational again after a disaster, either on-site or off-site.
Also among the chief priorities of businesses is ensuring the basic elements of its disaster recovery plan are clearly established, well-understood by management, and easily implementable.
Basic elements of a disaster recovery plan include the following:
- Enables a business’s IT department to provide a level of system functionality to operate, even if at a nominal level
- Recover the vast majority of data
- Functions to minimize negative impacts on business operations
- Ensures that businesses can effectively respond to a variety of threats, disasters, and hazardous conditions
Valuable tip: After completing your disaster recovery plan, backup the document and store the original in a secure yet easily accessible location for access by specific individuals only.
2 . Determine Your Specific Objectives and Goals – It’s vastly important for businesses to develop disaster recovery plans that also take into account crucial factors such as:
- Testing for quality control and efficacy
- Training members of upper management, and other personnel all the various aspects constituting the plan as a whole, and
- Implementing documentation protocols for reference in the event of similar issues occurring in the future
- Ability to access important data from alternate locations
After ensuring the inclusion of the above-mentioned features, businesses can consider some of the most commonly cited major goals in disaster recovery plans such as the following:
- Minimizes the degree of disruption to normal, routine business operations
- Reduces the multifaceted extent of impairment, damage, and overall harm (eg. negative effects on customers)
- Optimally mitigates any economic damage, such as loss of revenue and customers
- Establishes a high-quality backup protocol to ensure business continuity
- Educates and instructs company personnel with all the crucial procedures and most salient information in the disaster recovery plan
- Encompasses well-thought-out strategies to yield a swiftly expeditious and stable return to the pre-disaster state
Valuable tip: In determining the various goals for your business disaster recovery plan, take into consideration the latest trends that are being enthusiastically adopted by organizations worldwide.
Cutting-edge disaster recovery plan trends have become ubiquitous across a wide spectrum of business types, non-profits, and various organizations.
Providing enterprises of any kind with the ability to reexamine the concept of disaster recovery in new, unprecedented ways, these trends are resulting in countless changes in terms of how disaster recovery plans are drafted, planned, and ultimately executed.
Leveraging the depth and breadth of the all-new popular business trends and developments will help you keep abreast of the most advanced and efficacious methods available to safeguard your business operations for years to come
Contemporary trends that are immensely popular with businesses include the following:
- Cloud services – Providers offer businesses network services, infrastructure, or business applications in the cloud [that are] are hosted in a data center that can be accessed by companies or individuals using network connectivity.
- A primary benefit is increased efficiency via the building of infrastructural applications and services by Cloud service experts rather than companies having to rely on their own efforts
- The implementation of a shared infrastructure enables customers to access business services via the cloud
- Mobile devices – The rapidly increasing prevalence of the use of mobile devices in business operations
- Social Media – Using the skyrocketing popularity of social networking sites as a tool to improve profits, customer base, and overall visibility
3 – Brainstorm and Execute – Keeping In mind that a disaster recovery plan encompasses all of the procedures, policies, preventative measures, and emergency protocols of a business, you will need to craft your plan accordingly.
An easy way to begin structuring your disaster plan is to consider the various ways your business could be negatively impacted in the event of hardware failure, mistakes, hacking, or even natural disasters.
Next, establish the recovery methods that will be undertaken by company personnel in the event of specific types of disasters and the potential level and degree of disruption they can cause.
Your overarching goal when crafting your plan is to instill a set of methodologies and contingencies for when your business is compromised along with the associated strategies that will restore your business to an optimal state in a rapid and effective fashion.
Start the process of creating a well-crafted disaster recovery plan containing the following elements and their related answers.
- Introduction: Provide a summary of your organization’s disaster recovery plan objectives, including, but not limited to IT services and locations covered, RPOs and RTOs for different services, and testing and maintenance activities.
- Testing: Explain how your plan will be tested for efficacy in the face of various disruptive events. How will your testing protocol stay current? What evaluative measures will be taken and how often?
- Training: What types of training will be provided to employees, management, and other personnel? training and documentation will be provided to end users?
- IT services: Which systems, divisions, or business affiliates will support the various IT processes within your business?
- Suppliers: In the event of system failure, IT outage, or disaster, which suppliers will you turn to first? Many businesses initially contact their data recovery provider and make subsequent phone calls to other related suppliers
- Documentation: How will you document and record changes and modifications to your disaster recovery plan? Who will be tasked with recording changes in the plan?
- Relevancy: How do you intend to keep your disaster recovery plan current and in tune with today’s ever-evolving technology?
- Rebuilding: What processes and protocols are involved with restoring the business to its pre-disaster state? Who assesses the damage? Who is tasked with rebuilding efforts? Who is responsible for restoring the entirety of system damage?
- Locations: Where will business operations take place if your primary location is compromised or inaccessible? Will you have alternative worksites?
- Personnel: Who is tasked with what roles and responsibilities during disasters?
What roles will be given to internal personnel and what responsibilities will be given to external individuals or companies - RPO: Referring to recovery point objectives in planning for business continuity. Determine your RPO parameters – the specific interval of time passed during downtime, disasters, or disruptions before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds the Business Continuity Plan’s maximum allowable threshold or “tolerance.”
- RTO: Referring to recovery time objectives, RTO is the point in the future at which you will be back up and running full speed ahead. More explicitly, RTOP refers to the length of allowable time lapsed before backup efforts are put in action to resume normalcy in business services and activities.
- Triggers: What situation, hazard, disaster, or circumstances result in the triggering of the disaster response plan? Which personnel are notified first?
- Appendices: Consider what will be contained in this section. Examples include forms, documents, lists, action plans, and definitions relating to the disaster recovery plan, in addition to information describing alternate work locations and insurance details
Conclusion
Disaster recovery plans are used for an array of circumstances. “Whether it’s a deleted file, a ransomware attack, or a large-scale natural disaster, there are constant threats to IT infrastructure and the businesses that depend on them.” The many potential disasters that businesses are faced with often result in the potential for grave harm to a business’s reputation, its relationship with customers, and its financial bottom line
Downtime is among the biggest concerns for businesses across the world when it comes to disaster recovery. Recent estimates state that even one hour of downtime during a business disaster can result in a loss of up to $8,000 for small businesses, $74,000 for mid-sized companies and $700,000 for large businesses.
Modern-day threats to business continuity are continuously evolving and are in turn, creating a sense of fear and apprehension in the business and IT sectors. Reassuring, however, any enterprise can minimize the impact of an outage by making a disaster recovery plan to guarantee business continuity.
Today companies of all types and sizes are readily incorporating disaster recovery plans and software into their businesses to ensure their sustainability, viability, and market presence well into the coming years.
