Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business
Roy Castleman
Discover how important it is to create a disaster recovery plan for your business, then how you can build one according to your SMEs needs.
You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
Accidents happen. But, some accidents are far worse than others and can come with dire consequences. Think of a disaster recovery plan (DRP) like insurance for your car.
It’s there to protect you from the inevitable possibilities of loss and damages.
Why You Need a DRP?
You’ll likely face a greater amount of downtime without one, which costs not only revenue loss, but loss of customer faith in your brand.
It may seriously disrupt business as usual, too, which impacts your service's reputation. Fortunately, if you have a plan ready to go, you can get back up and running in no time.
Data recovery plans involve preventing data loss. When measures are taken ahead of time, any threat isn't catastrophic because data may easily be recovered.
If not, you'll lose customer trust and may even face legal issues due to security breaches.
What Could Go Wrong?
You need to protect your business from an IT “disaster”, but what might that look like?
It could be a “natural disaster” such as a flood or fire that wipes out information on your hardware, or an unfortunate case of cyber crime, in which information is stolen from hackers. They may even hold your data “hostage.”
How to Draft a DRP?
There are several other ways things may go south, but in the end, it’s not as important how they did so, but that you’ve constructed a way forward after them.
The tips given ahead focus on what your business’ disaster recovery plan can entail.
Document It
It may sound simple, but the act of thinking through the best course of action in different emergency scenarios makes a big difference if and when they happen.
Train Your Staff
Your employees should be completely prepared for any disaster, big or small.
First, this helps catch and mitigate problems quicker and often prevents them from happening at all. But in case things do worsen, it’s important they know what to do and don’t feel stressed during the recovery process.
Data Backup
With data at the crux of your business’ operations, permanent data loss can be devastating.
Store a copy of all data off-site, away from your office. Alternatively, you can use a cloud service provider which safeguards your data by backing it up across multiple servers.
Assess Your Set Up
It’s important to know all the IT components your business uses, and in which ways your business depends on them.
First, evaluate all hardware requirements. Think about how you can solve issues arising from any of them malfunctioning.
For example, you should have all your hardware supplier’s information easily accessible.
Then, consider how all IT components function together.
For example, contemplate how a power outage or internet failure may affect other IT operations.
Put in place a temporary solution for when the office facilities are down. In sum, you should think of everything you can, ahead of time.
Operate at Your Best
You don’t want to let your customers down and give them anything less than the service they expect.
Be it keeping their information safe, delivering products and services on time, or enabling your staff to serve them without stress. If problems happen, they shouldn’t escalate past temporary or minor.
In reality, a disaster recovery plan is a part of your business’ continuity plan. A startling majority of businesses which suffer an extensive data loss catastrophe go out of business entirely.
Having a recovery plan in place gives you and your team the preparation they need to make sure this doesn’t happen.