Disaster Recovery Plans Explained: Is Your Business IT Disaster Ready?

No one in business wants to face a disaster, and yet all of us are at risk of it. We have already seen what a global pandemic can do, and things like wars, natural disasters and politics can very quickly provide a threat for a huge number of businesses. This is why it is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place to help get a business back up and running if the worst were to happen.

In this article, RoundWorks IT look at what disaster recovery plans should include and help you to identify whether your business is ready to face an IT disaster or not.

What is a disaster recovery plan?

All businesses should have a detailed disaster recovery plan in place that will outline how they should respond to different types of disaster that might occur. This might be something that you build yourself or outsource to a third-party specialist.

A disaster recovery plan might cover many different things, but one of your most important elements should be your IT plans.

An IT disaster can bring virtually every business to its knees, so you need to have strategies, procedures and protocols in place to help recover your IT infrastructure and systems as quickly as possible.

Your IT disaster recovery plan needs to be able to help you recover data and get back to normal business operations as soon as you can, whether you have been struck down by a natural disaster, a cyberattack or a hardware failure.

If you have this kind of plan in place, you can minimise the amount of downtime your business will suffer, as well as mitigating your risk, protecting any data that you hold and ensuring business continuity with minimal losses.

Why is an IT disaster recovery plan important?

Your disaster recovery plan needs to be in place to ensure that your business can get up and running again as quickly as possible. When systems have been taken down, either intentionally or by accident, it can take days, weeks or even months to fully recover if you do not have a plan in place.

This can cost huge amounts of money as you may not be able to take new sales or deliver services while your systems are down.

It is also something that can impact massively on customer trust and so you can show your own preparedness and resilience by getting a disaster recovery plan to work on your behalf and maintain customer confidence.

Disaster recovery plans are also important for regulatory compliance. They will help you to meet any legal and regulatory requirements for data protection and business continuity, helping you to avoid hefty fines and penalties.

What does a disaster recovery plan include?

Each disaster recovery plan will be unique to your own business, but it will need to include things like a risk assessment and analysis of the business impact and a continuity plan, amongst other things. Before you think about implementing a disaster recovery plan, you should make sure that you have tested it and that your staff are aware of its existence and have been trained to use it properly. This means it can be put into place as quickly as possible at the moment it is needed.

Risk assessment

To understand what you need to include in your disaster recovery plan, you first need to understand what risks you face. It is therefore essential that you carry out a risk assessment to identify where any potential threats of vulnerabilities might lie. You should look at all on site and data centre environments to create a full picture of your potential disaster scenarios.

Once you have outlined every possibility you should then look at the likelihood and the impact of each one. This will help you to prioritise your risks and then allocate your resources effectively. You should make sure that you involve key stakeholders from various departments so that you can get a full view of the IT environment and be confident that you have covered all areas.

Business impact analysis

You should make sure that you carry out a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine the criticality of IT systems and prioritise your recovery efforts. This means your resources will be directed in the right way, having assessed the impact of any disruptions on your business processes.

Your BIA should help you to establish your recovery time objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable time for restoring any critical systems and resuming operations. It should also include a recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.

Once you have your RPO, you can then understand the cost of any downtime and determine how frequently data backups should occur to make sure your data loss is kept within the acceptable limits. This is also a good time to define any backup procedures and have data backup and recovery strategies to ensure everything can be restored as quickly as possible.

Continuity plan

A good disaster recovery plan needs to include a continuity plan as this will help you to develop strategies that will ensure the uninterrupted operation of critical business functions both during and after an IT disaster.

This will help you to find alternative processes, resources and recovery procedures that will help you to maintain operations, or by looking at alternative processes, you can identify and document alternative workflows that will keep your critical functions running. For resource allocation, you should ensure that any necessary resources like personnel and equipment will be available and quickly mobilised.

You then need to look at recovery procedures that will outline the steps needed to restore your IT systems and data. You should also select a Secondary location where you can safely recover your IT infrastructure and resume business operations during a disaster.

Ideally, this should be geographically distant from the primary location to avoid the risk of it being affected by the same problem.

An IT disaster has the potential to bring your business to a halt, but if you have a proper disaster recovery plan in place, you can ensure that any downtime is minimised, and your business can continue to function.