The focus of a Disaster Recovery Plan is generally on the type of threats that we read about these days such has ransomware, power outages or server/software failure, virus attacks, unplanned updates and patches and even human error.
The impact upon businesses with documented disaster recovery procedures is significantly reduced. However the DRP needs to be easy to follow so that the entire organisation can understand it and help your company mitigate against loss and ensure survival.
There are a number of key elements to take into account when developing a DRP.
1. Recovery process
What are the most important assets that need protection?
The first thing you need to decide is which assets need to be prioritised in order to recover critical applications quickly. There’ll be some that the business can survive without for a short period of time, but crucial functions such as email, will need to be restored immediately.
2. Recovery time
Getting critical systems restored as quickly as possible is key and every second counts. Define an acceptable recovery time in which both critical and non-critical data must be restored and carry out a business impact analysis to help you to identify critical elements and address gaps in the recovery model. This information will help you create the right recovery timeline.
3. People
There must be an individual responsible for each task in the DRP. You should identify key roles and responsibilities to ensure each member of the DR team knows what to do. This also minimises stress for all involved. And it will be stressful!
If an IT partner has a part to play in your disaster recovery plan, it’s important that you and your partner know each other’s responsibilities. These should be documented in the disaster recovery plan.
4. Communication
It’s important that those responsible for managing recovery can communicate with each other and update employees. So ensure you have established an alternative method of contact in case something happens to affect landlines, mobile phones or mail server.
5. Budget
The shorter your recovery time, the larger your budget needs to be. So when considering your recovery time, you need to consider costs.
6. Don’t forget to test
As your organisation grows and technology changes, so will your plan and it needs to be tested once a quarter. Your plan needs to reflect how you would deal with the new threats which are constantly being introduced.
Disaster recovery strategies ensure that when your IT systems are disrupted, there is a process in place to ensure that your business is running again as soon as possible.
By Trilogy Technologies.
