Most people associate disaster recovery with major natural disasters such as fires, floods, or earthquakes. However, not all disasters in the cybersecurity space are natural. Many businesses are hit by man-made disasters such as cyberattacks that corrupt data or render vital assets unusable.
Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a critical risk mitigation measure, whether your company faces a natural disaster or a cybersecurity threat. IT Support Vancouver provides a Disaster Recovery plan that ensures your systems are properly backed up, regardless of human error, hardware failure, power outages, or other internal or external disruptions.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
An IT disaster recovery (DR) plan is a business action plan that can be implemented in the event of a worst-case scenario disaster. Depending on the organization’s existing assets and recovery goals, disaster recovery planning can employ a variety of tools. The “disaster” in disaster recovery planning can be any event that disrupts access to data, apps, or systems. Power outages, data storage corruption, DDoS attacks, natural disasters that disrupt server connections—anything and everything that disrupts IT workflows falls into this category. The objective is to recover from the data disaster and resume normal operations.
If the worst happens and you are unable to operate your business from its normal location or use your network, an effective disaster recovery plan will allow you to continue to meet the needs of your customers.
How to Create an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan?
Risk Assessment
The ability to respond to a wide range of disasters is at the core of any disaster recovery plan. Before you can respond, you must first assess the various scenarios in which a disaster could disrupt your business operations and to what extent. You will be able to identify priorities and put a recovery plan in place by analyzing the risk and business impact of potential disruption and financial loss to your business.
Risk assessment is an important first step in developing an effective disaster recovery plan. Once the potential hazards have been identified, it is easier to determine which assets are most important to ensure business continuity.
Determine What’s “Mission-Critical”
There’s a good chance that your company processes and maintains a lot more data than you might realize, and that a lot of it is unnecessary or not really necessary for you to keep things functioning. You may probably come across a number of data sets that aren’t that important while conducting your IT asset audit. You can make your backup file smaller and save storage precious space later on by eliminating redundant or unnecessary material. Additionally, this is an opportunity to practice good data hygiene by deleting unnecessary files from endpoints where they shouldn’t be kept.
Responsibilities and Communication
No matter how a disaster hits, it must be resolved, and all people involved must be informed of the issue. Someone on your staff needs to be tasked with organizing the reaction to each potential calamity. Don’t mention names because employees come and go. Assign responsibilities to various business roles.
The person in the designated job will be in charge of organizing the response procedure and informing all parties affected of the issue. In some cases, you’ll also need to figure out which roles carry out which duties later on in the recovery plan.
Actions to Take and Recovery Goals
Making a written plan of action gives each of the people who have been given lead responsibility a step-by-step manual. The trickiest part of a disaster recovery plan is this portion since you have to know what options you have. When you first design a disaster recovery plan, there will be certain calamities that are not obvious or even likely. At this point, it’s crucial to lay down timelines. You must decide how long your company can go without running and how quickly the issue needs to be fixed.
Summary
A disaster recovery plan outlines how to resume regular business operations, reconstruct or save key data, and salvage equipment. It serves as a roadmap for all management and staff members both during and after a disaster.
Post courtesy: Andrew Dalman, President at ActiveCo Technology Management.
