Disaster Recovery
A quick overview of the topics covered in this article.
Importance Of Disaster Recovery Plan For Every Business
Businesses need a competitive edge if they want to progress in highly saturated and competitive markets. That’s because this competition has shrunk the customer base you can target, while the online threats have become absolute disasters for businesses, hindering business recovery.
In simpler words, modern businesses depend on computers and advanced technology, which means IT failure can lead to disastrous impacts. Businesses must understand that disasters are meant to happen, ranging from ransomware to cyberattacks. That’s because they can target businesses of every size, which is why disaster recovery plans are critical.
What is a disaster recovery plan? It’s a plan that helps minimizes the business fallout when things go down and regulate the business operations. The article below gives us more details on the importance of a disaster recovery plan!
The Pros of Implementing a Disaster Recovery Policy
When you have a well-designed disaster recovery policy implemented in the business, it helps reduce the negative impacts of a disaster, ranging from a cyberattack to fire or flood. A high-quality policy will ensure a proper framework that identifies, remediates, and communicates the critical points during an incident.
In addition, a policy sets specific recovery time objectives to minimize the downtime incurred during a disaster scenario and helps learn from these incidents while ensuring that the business operations are smooth. On the parallel side, a proper disaster recovery plan is executed and tested at least annually, ensuring team members are familiar with the process and the process works when the disaster strikes.
The Outcome of the Absence of Policy
Whenever IT disasters hit, and you don’t have a plan, process, or framework to follow for dealing with these disasters, it results in longer than acceptable outage times. Some consequences include loss of brand damage, lawsuits, and financial loss.
The First Steps of Developing A Disaster Recovery Plan
Whenever you work with a team to devise a disaster recovery plan, it’s essential to write down all the systems a business depends on, irrespective of the role and size. In addition, you must mention the negative outcomes that would appear if these systems lost their integrity or simply aren’t available. These two steps help set the stage for disaster recovery.
Depending on the list of systems and consequences, adding people from HR, communications, legal, IT, and senior management is recommended to design the disaster recovery team. Some additional components that you need to consider include the following;
- Defining the asset inventory
- Defining the disaster recovery team’s members
- Identifying and prioritizing the risks
- Backing up the process review and testing
- Developing a well-sequenced recovery plan for every high-risk system
- Implementing the tabletop exercises to test the impact of the recovery plan
In addition to developing the disaster recovery plan, it’s critical to work on the business continuity plan, which becomes the overarching guide for a business to continue operations. A disaster recovery plan is usually focused on IT systems and is a subset of the overall business continuity plan. Depending on the disaster, there can be more to manage than just the technology.
The Essential Tools For Disaster Recovery Plan
The most essential tools for disaster recovery policy include communication tools and detection tools. The detection tools depend on your business type and the tech assets, such as dark web monitoring tools, log management software, and IDS/IPS. 
Setting The Budget
When it comes down to the budget for designing the disaster recovery policy, it varies with the size and nature of the business. In addition, one should consider the IT system’s nature and corporate budget. It’s all about the critical business processes.
The bottom line is that implementing a robust and well-designed disaster recovery plan is essential to resume normal operations after an incident! Contact us today to see how we can help you implement a disaster recovery program.
