In the context of business, a disaster is an unforeseen event that has a negative impact on your business and forces you to shut down operations partially or completely. These could be natural events like a flood or fire, or they can be human-made, such as a malware attack or intentional sabotage.
To ensure business continuity in uncertain times like these, your organisation needs a disaster recovery plan to prevent the devastating effects of prolonged downtime. The loss of revenue, market position, and customer trust are often too much for small to medium-sized businesses like yours to absorb, so having a plan to deal with a serious disaster is a matter of survival.
What Are Disaster Recovery Plans, and Why Are They Crucial for Businesses?
An IT disaster recovery plan is a detailed action plan that details what each of your employees must do and which tools must be leveraged to mitigate the damage of an unforeseen disaster and return to full operations.
Every minute an unforeseen event stops you from doing your work, you fall further behind and your revenue suffers. What’s worse, if you provide services or support to customers, they can no longer rely on you, and will begin looking for an alternative, more reliable provider. If the disaster is particularly damaging, you could be out for days on end, which is when the survival of your business becomes an issue.
Unfortunately, on a long enough timeline, a disaster befalling your business is not a matter of if, but rather, when. Therefore, a disaster recovery plan is a crucial component of business in all industries and of every size.
Important Disaster Recovery Terms
When learning about disaster recovery plans, there are several terms you will see used often that you should understand to improve your company’s plan. These include:
- Business continuity:
This refers to your organisation’s ability to perform at full operations and output. If you are able to achieve business continuity, that means an event has not disrupted your operations enough to keep you from full productivity. If you fail to achieve business continuity, your operations have halted and your productivity and revenue feel the negative impact.
- Recovery time objective (RTO)
: RTO is the minimum time your recovery can take to achieve business continuity. Basically, if recovering your systems after a disaster takes longer than your RTO, you will fail to achieve continuity and suffer negative consequences. You want your RTO to be as short as possible.
- Recovery point objective (RPO):
RPO is how much data loss your company can experience within a period most relevant to its business before significant harm occurs. Can your business get back to full operations while still losing all of a day’s data? Or do you need to recover your systems to exactly where they were at least an hour ago?
The Role of Business Continuity Planning in Minimising Operational Disruptions
Business continuity planning involves an action plan for all of your employees, not just your IT personnel, and includes risk assessment processes and mitigation strategies. An effective disaster recovery plan lays out what each employee must do during a disaster and in the aftermath to mitigate the damage, prevent any further damage, and restore your systems and data to where they were before the disaster.
It also instructs your teams on which tools to leverage during times of crises, such as cybersecurity tools in the event of a breach or data backup solutions to mitigate data loss.
Your business recovery strategies ensure that critical operations continue smoothly in several ways:
- Preventing panic:
With clear instructions and a plan of action, your employees will be less prone to panicking during a disaster and slowing your recovery.
- Shortening RTO:
Your plan enables you to reach a shorter RTO, minimising productivity loss.
- Reducing your RPO:
An effective plan with robust tools enables you to recover your systems to a more recent point, minimising data and work loss and thus the damage they cause.
- Preventing knock-on disasters:
Your cybersecurity is often at its weakest in the midst of a disaster, but if your plan includes emergency cybersecurity measures you can be protected from a one-two punch of disaster and data breach.
How IT Recovery Solutions Support Your Business Continuity During Crises
Your IT disaster recovery plan is more than just instructions for employees. It also includes the hardware or software solutions that must be leveraged to ensure you hit your recovery targets.
IT recovery solutions that can support your business continuity include:
- Cloud solutions:
Disaster recovery for businesses should always include a cloud solution of some kind. Having an off-site, geo-redundant cloud server insulates you from localised disasters.
Data backup solutions: More than just a backup drive, data backup solutions now often include automated software that regularly creates and uploads ‘snapshots’ of your stored data and systems. In the event of a disaster, these snapshots can be restored, bringing your systems back to where they were mere minutes before the disaster struck.
- Data recovery solutions:
Getting your IT back up and running requires more than flipping a switch. Recovery solutions accelerate your system restoration protocols automatically by prioritising vital systems first to shorten your RTO.
- Cybersecurity monitoring:
If your disaster is a cyberattack, you need to know what happened, what the threat is, where it came from, how it compromised your systems, and how to stop it from occurring again. Independent cybersecurity monitoring services provide vital intelligence to help you understand the threat and better defend against similar incidents in the future.
Building Effective Emergency Response Plans for Rapid Business Recovery
Here are some components of an emergency response plan that all effective business recovery strategies should include:
- Risk assessment:
Your plan should detail the risks and recovery strategies associated with all manner of disasters, from natural disasters to cyberattacks.
- Incident response team:
Prepare a list of the primary responders and leaders during a disaster.
- Communication plan:
Make sure your internal staff know which communication channels to use during a disaster or security incident.
- Data backup protocol:
Identify which backup tools must be leveraged and how.
- IT recovery plan:
Establish the order in which systems and data must be restored for optimal RTO.
Review and update schedule: Determine the frequency and process by which your plan is tested and updated with new information and systems.
For expert assistance with creating a customised disaster recovery plan for your business, speak with experienced consultants by contacting Techware.
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