IT Disaster Recovery

With the advancing tech and more robust businesses, we nowadays estimate that even the shortest operational downtimes could have critical financial consequences. Just one minute of downtime, in some estimates, may cost a business around $5,600 +, meaning that an hour may cost anywhere in the ballpark of a whopping $300,000. This number inflates further for an even larger organization.

This means that a well-designed, scalable to situation, and effectively maintained disaster recovery plan is absolutely crucial as it would enable your organization to quickly bounce back from any issue, recover, and resume normal operation in the shortest amount of time possible.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Putting together a suitable disaster recovery plan for your business will depend on your future plans and will need to align with your business goals and strategies.

1. Risk Reduction

Primary objective of a solid disaster recovery plan is to reduce overall risk for the enterprise. To this end, we complete a current risk assessment in order to identify and understand any existing system vulnerabilities, positioning you to address them in the future. Numbered scales are frequently used to measure the risk levels for ease of prioritization.

2. Resume Operations in an Emergency

Time is money – in case of a disaster, a good business will be up and running as soon as possible. Being able to deploy solutions internally and externally and to resume operating normally as fast as possible is therefore a necessity.

3. Address Owner/Investor Concerns

A good disaster recovery plan will maintain trust in an enterprise – for those concerned, knowing that there is a plan in place for every contingency will suffice to put them at ease in doing their business with you. Owners, investors, boards of directors, shareholders, and anyone with money in the game will appreciate a good plan.

Listing the top concerns of the aforementioned individuals might provide you with a basic idea of where the principal corporate liabilities lie and what you need to incorporate into your plan.

4. Regular Maintenance

A good disaster plan should go through update cycles regularly – a prudent IT strategy is to run these routine risk assessment checks on a reasonably frequent schedule to identify and address risks proactively. Technology evolves very rapidly and each organization needs to scale their efforts to be competitive.

5. Narrow Disaster Response

You will only get one shot to respond to a disaster quickly and effectively – this means that your IT teams and all stakeholders need to mobilize and coordinate with speed and expertize to get communications out and backups live as soon as possible. The response time to a disaster is recommended to be tested at least once a year to ensure that in a real disaster scenario, the procedures in place and their execution are conducive to a narrow response time.

Disaster Recovery Plan Creation Responsibilities

Before you begin designing a good disaster recovery plan, it is important to get the right people on board to take lead of the process. To this end, every organization should establish a disaster recovery plan committee that will include all the key decision-makers and crucial stakeholders across the organization. Committee should have people from IT, security, finance, legal, and so on. These individual members will coordinate to outline, implement, test and maintain a proper disaster recovery plan.

Disaster Recovery Template

Every disaster recovery playbook needs to contain information outlining possible risks, identifying mission-critical functions, and strategy that will be implemented for recovery of each of these functions.

The language within the playbook will need to be concise and explain each contingency and procedure clearly – the DRP document will not be in use solely by IT experts and needs to be legible to anyone stemming from any background and each individual involved will need to have clear understanding of each step contained within.

Basic points that a good disaster recovery plan should include are as follows:

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

Final Thoughts

A disaster recovery plan is vital for every organization. If you already have one, then it is vital to constantly work on improving it and maintaining it routinely. There is no business that can afford an ineffective response to threats – it is too late to make a DRP if a disaster already occurred. Whether your business thrives or becomes a bleak statistic depends on you putting a solid disaster recovery plan in place!