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Today’s digital world tempo could have significant financial consequences to your business with even the slightest technology disruption. IT downtime per minute is estimated at around $5,600 or more than $300,000 per hour. If the organization is larger the number could go up to a million dollars.
Therefore, a well designed and effectively maintained disaster recovery plan in place would increase your ability to recover everything and return to normal operating as soon as possible.

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Disaster Recovery Plan

Crafting the right disaster recovery plan for your business depends on the goals you would like the plan to accomplish.

1. Risk Reduction

A good recovery plan’s primary goal is to reduce the enterprises’ overall risk. Current risk assessment from the company should be conducted to understand its vulnerabilities so that they could be addressed in the future. For measuring the risk levels, a number scale could come in hand.

2. Resume Operations in an Emergency

In case of a disaster, time plays the main role in enterprises. Pushing out information and solutions to internal and external customers and resuming operations as quickly as possible is a necessity.

3. Address Owner/Investor Concerns

For enterprise businesses, a disaster recovery plan should ease concerns of whoever is at the top of the organization — be it owners, investors, a board of directors or shareholders.

Taking inventory of the top concerns from these groups will give you a good idea of high-level corporate liabilities that must be addressed if a plan is to be effective.

4. Regular Maintenance

A disaster plan should be updated regularly. A good strategy is for the IT department to run routine risk assessments on a schedule and ensure the disaster recovery plan addresses all risks at any given time. As technology evolves and changes throughout an organization the reaches of that technology must also be considered.

5. Narrow Disaster Response

You have one shot at having the fastest response deployment possible and getting communications and backups live in the event of an emergency and ensuring that your IT team and other disaster recovery stakeholders can mobilize quickly and in a coordinated way. Disaster response time should be tested once a year routinely, and that would narrow the time in a real crisis.

Who is Responsible for What in Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Having the right people in place to lead the charge is important before you begin mapping out your Disaster Recovery Plan. Every organization should establish a Disaster Recovery Plan committee, in which are involved the key decision-makers from across the organization. From top management to HR, finance, security, various IT departments and so on. Collectively, these individuals will be responsible for outlining, implementing, testing and maintaining the disaster recovery plan.

Disaster Recovery Template

Disaster recovery playbook needs to be written with information about what risks you’re planning,  mission-critical functions and the methods you need to implement to recover those systems.

Keep in mind the language used throughout and the importance of explaining assumptions since the DRP document will be viewed by other key players that don’t have an IT background but who still need to be able to understand the steps involved.

The basic categories of your disaster recovery plan should include:

  • Initial Analysis
  • Introduction or Summary
  • Document Outline
  • Overview of the Plan
  • Overview of the Infrastructure
  • Plan Contingency

Final Thoughts

It’s essential for your organization to create a disaster recovery plan. In the case of having one, it’s beneficial to improve and maintain it. No business can afford an ineffective response to threads. When the disaster occurs it’s too late… Is your business gonna survive or become a statistic depends on the disaster recovery plan!

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