Here, I will be discussing putting together a disaster recovery plan for your business.
Planning ahead is crucial for your business in various areas. Whether you’re attempting to predict what your competitors are doing or creating a financial safety net for your business, the more prepared you are, the more resilient and capable your business will be.
However, there may come a time when you experience a much larger disturbance to your operations than you anticipated.
Whether dealing with a natural disaster or a major cyberattack, it’s essential to have a detailed plan that you can follow to help you resume operations as quickly as possible, preventing irreversible damage.
When it comes to planning for the unknown, having a well-structured disaster recovery plan is critical.
Table of Contents
Why Disaster Recovery Planning is So Important?
As you develop your business, it’s natural to want to focus your resources on expansion efforts, such as sales and marketing.
However, while you’re busy trying to grow your revenue channels, it can be easy to overlook the planning efforts needed to help you recover fast from significant disruptions.
If an unforeseen problem arises that brings your operations to a standstill, you’re likely to experience not only financial setbacks but also potential lost trust from your customers. This is why disaster recovery planning is so important to prioritize from the very beginning.
Disaster recovery plans not only help you recover as quickly as possible following a major incident, but they can also be an essential element of ensuring your business meets its data security and compliance requirements.
Core Elements for a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan
Established Recovery Teams
If you’re trying to bounce back quickly from a disaster, you’ll need to rely heavily on your internal teams or third parties to assist. It’s essential to have a clearly outlined list of crucial personnel involved in recovery tasks ahead of time, including their contact information and preferred methods of communication.
Getting IT, business operations, and third-party security teams involved from the very beginning is key to designing an effective recovery plan. Ensure that every person involved understands their responsibilities in the event of a disaster and is adequately trained on how to carry out their critical assignments.
Documented Tactics and Procedures
Mapping out various tactics or procedures involved in the recovery process is critical for your recovery plan. These are the necessary steps that your teams will be following from start to finish to return your operations to a stable state.
A key element to address in your documented procedures is determining the order of activities. It’s essential to have a priority order in place, particularly if multiple systems or databases become compromised.
This will ensure that you’re bringing the most critical elements of your infrastructure online first, before spending too much time on less essential elements.
By carefully assessing your business’s specific needs now, you’ll be able to define these priorities more clearly in the event that you need to initiate recovery procedures.
Accurate Inventory of Assets and Resources
Before you can start to map out different recovery strategies, you’ll first need to have an accurate inventory of all of your essential assets and resources.
This not only helps you to ensure nothing is missed during recovery procedures, but also gives you an understanding of what will be available to you when executing each recovery step.
Your inventory should include things such as your critical hardware and software, important data, physical office locations, necessary equipment, vendor contracts, and key personnel involved in the recovery process.
Essential Business Backups
Having up-to-date backups on hand in the wake of a major disruption can make all the difference when getting your operations back up and running.
This not only ensures that you can accurately replicate how your systems looked before disaster strikes, but it can also be invaluable when trying to recover from a significant issue, such as ransomware or another form of cyberattack, that makes your data inaccessible.
Decide how you want to manage your data backups – whether in-house or stored off-site. In most cases, it’s best practice to have multiple backups available in the event that one or more of them become compromised.
Cycle of Testing and Improving
Getting your initial disaster recovery strategy down on paper is just the first step. To ensure it performs as needed when it really matters, it’s essential to test it regularly.
One of the most common mistakes businesses make is viewing disaster recovery planning as a one-time project. However, it should be viewed no differently from any other business function. It should be regularly tested and refined as the business grows and its needs evolve.
By regularly testing its effectiveness through penetration testing scenarios with your key recovery personnel, you’ll ensure that nothing is missed, while also ensuring that everyone clearly understands what is required of them during a real emergency situation.
Keep Your Business Prepared
Disaster recovery planning is a critical element of maximizing your business’s resilience.
By following the strategies discussed, you’ll ensure that your disaster recovery plan includes all the necessary elements to help your business resume normal operations as quickly as possible during major disruptions.
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About the Author:
Nazy Fouladirad is President and COO of Tevora, a global leading cybersecurity consultancy. She has dedicated her career to creating a more secure business and online environment for organizations across the country and world. She is passionate about serving her community and acts as a board member for a local nonprofit organization.
