At a time when less-than-great news has become the norm, it’s hard to act surprised when a crisis looms. Although we continue to hope for the best, we’ve all come to expect the worst. That’s why having a disaster recovery plan ready to roll is crucial.
A comprehensive recovery plan will minimize the effect of a natural disaster on business continuity, compliance, and data loss. A good plan also helps speed up recovery from cyberattacks, such as those recently hitting Ticketmaster, AT&T, and Dell.
If your organization’s disaster recovery plan is outdated, insufficient, or worse, nonexistent, let these events motivate you to review, revise, or create a disaster recovery strategy now, before you need it.
So, what is a disaster recovery plan, and what should it include?
Here are eight steps to create a disaster recovery plan that will help prevent data loss, facilitate business continuity, and ensure your sensitive data and SLAs remain compliant.
During a crisis, your disaster response team will spearhead recovery efforts and disseminate information to employees, customers, and stakeholders.
Assign each team member specific response tasks and document them so everyone knows who oversees what. You will also need backup staff for key team members if a designated lead isn’t available during a crisis.
One of the most crucial components of a data disaster recovery plan is establishing your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
RTO is the length of time an application can be down before your business is negatively impacted. RTO varies widely among applications because some can be down for only a few seconds before the business, customers, or users are affected. In contrast, others can be down for hours, days, or weeks.
RTOs are calculated based on the application’s importance:
Your recovery point objective (RPO) is the most data that can be lost before your business is significantly harmed. This IT disaster recovery plan component dictates how frequently you’ll need to back up your data.
The amount you are willing to spend to back up a particular application also comes into play because as you work to control IT costs:
Creating detailed documentation of your network infrastructure will make it much easier to rebuild the system after a disaster, especially if a cyberattack corrupted the network.
Different system components have different levels of importance to business continuity, so be sure to indicate the priority of each service as mission-critical, essential, or nonessential so they can be restored in the appropriate order. Don’t forget to include system dependencies in your blueprint because they may impact how you prioritize recovery.
Storage capacity, recovery timeline, and configuration complexity will affect the cost of a disaster recovery solution. In many cases, you are choosing between a solution that offers quick recovery times but may lose days of data and a solution that maintains system availability but kills you with high complexity and costs.
Look for a disaster recovery solution like Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), which affordably protects your systems and applications from data loss. Arcserve also minimizes complexity by making it easy to manage backup, disaster recove and restore service-level agreements.
Only some incidents warrant a full-fledged deployment of your disaster response plan. Creating a checklist of criteria to identify what constitutes a disaster helps your recovery team know when it’s time to jump into action without wasting resources or money by overreacting to a minor threat.
For example, a temporary power outage and a direct hit from a category four hurricane require very different responses.
To ensure data and operations are restored quickly after a disaster, create step-by-step instructions in plain language so your team can start the disaster recovery effort as soon as it’s safe.
Store a copy of the disaster recovery plan away from the network or in immutable storage to protect it from corruption during a ransomware attack or physical loss from a natural disaster.
Test your disaster recovery plan regularly to ensure it will work when needed. Run a partial recovery test twice a year and a full recovery simulation annually.
It also doesn’t hurt to periodically spring surprise drills on the company so you can accurately assess how well the processes will work in a real emergency.
Your business disaster recovery plan is only part of your overall business continuity strategy. Regular reviews and updates must be made to reflect organizational changes and how they impact the recovery process. To learn more about business continuity planning, check out our post, 6 Steps for Developing a Business Continuity Plan .
Arcserve technology partners have the experience, expertise, and solutions to help you create and maintain an effective disaster recovery plan and ensure your organization can survive any disaster.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Cybersecurity Data Protection Data Resilience Ransomware
Backup and Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Compliance Cybersecurity Data Protection Data Resilience Ransomware