A disaster recovery plan is a documented process that includes a disaster recovery strategy as well as a list of well-thought-out disaster recovery processes, all with the goal of protecting your company against costly calamities.
We’ve detailed the 10 main aspects of a disaster recovery plan in your disaster recovery plan template to help you get started!
Many organizations believe they don’t need an IT disaster recovery plan (IT DRP) for a variety of reasons, but one simple truth explains why they do: the majority of IT catastrophes (large and little) are caused by human error.
Simply said, your workers are the most important reason why your company requires an IT disaster recovery plan (also known as DRP or IT DR).It’s not that you need to worry about dissatisfied employees damaging crucial systems, though it does happen sometimes.
The most typical threat comes from your employees just being… employees, who click on a poor link or open a malware-infected file attached to an email.Because humans are flawed, disaster recovery planning must pay particular attention to your company’s most well-intentioned but unavoidably faulty asset. The DRP will reduce the chance of human mistakes making it more difficult for hackers, viruses, and ransomware assaults to succeed.
- Conduct a thorough IT audit and inventory
To implement a solid disaster recovery strategy, you must first conduct a detailed assessment of your IT assets. This will cover all on-premises hardware and software, as well as any cloud-based systems and services that your company uses.
This evaluation and risk analysis is usually done by your IT provider, and it might take a long time depending on the size of your organization and the complexity of your business operations.
In the case of an IT catastrophe, a business may find it difficult to restore vital processes or data if the DRP evaluation is not completed or is incomplete.
A managed security service provider, regardless of your business, may play a significant role in ensuring that your security and compliance standards are satisfied as part of your disaster recovery preparation.
- The DR Plan’s IT Backup Management Strategy
It’s time to start working on an IT disaster plan when you’ve done a complete review of your IT assets – data, systems, hardware, and the cloud.
The formal strategy creation process in disaster recovery planning starts when an IT engineer evaluates the facts from the assessment to determine which tools and techniques will work best for your scenario and company operations.
Because each organization’s dependence on and utilization of data, apps, on-site assets, and cloud-based solutions differs, DR planning varies.
Migrating to the cloud instead of maintaining physical off-site data centers (also known as disaster recovery sites) for DR plans may be the most cost-effective technological disaster recovery plan choice for a firm.
The data center disaster recovery plan is your ultimate assurance of safety inside your own DR plan, since these fortresses have their own enterprise-level defenses.
When firms have more information needs and aggressive recovery time requirements, an internal disaster recovery site may be a better match for the recovery approach.
The IT professionals utilize their knowledge and skills to fine-tune the recovery plan that will work for your firm during the planning stage of the business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) process.
- Employee Training is Required for Proper Backup Management
Disaster recovery methods must be championed by senior management and implemented across the firm in order to be successful.
Every member of the management team, as well as all employees, must understand their responsibility in keeping processes safe under the protection of the IT disaster recovery plan.
If an employee, for example, chooses to make their work “easier” by downloading software from the internet without consulting IT, they are essentially removing a portion of the company’s data and operations from the security provided by business continuity planning and disaster recovery plans.
A company must spend in teaching personnel in both cybersecurity awareness and their particular duties (the procedures they should take) if catastrophe hits as part of disaster recovery management.
- Form disaster response groups
An emergency response team that decides to what degree the disaster recovery plan must be used is a best practice for a disaster recovery plan.
Once the roles and duties have been allocated, this group contacts and assembles the disaster recovery team, which consists of IT experts as well as key personnel from the primary business units who are responsible for business recovery.
It’s crucial to develop and test the plan using disruption rehearsals, in which delegated personnel responds to disaster recovery plan scenarios. Practice makes perfect, and it also embeds the issue in the workplace culture so that no one ever has to question, “What is a disaster recovery?”
In order to react in the event of a natural catastrophe or personal injury, team members must have the contact information of third parties such as major customers, suppliers, insurance, media outlets, and even family members, according to the disaster recovery policy.
A financial evaluation of disaster-related expenses and the cost of resuming regular operations will be included in the recovery plan form.
- Make sure your data and workflow backups are included.
Data backup is perhaps the most important aspect of any IT disaster recovery strategy. It’s crucial to keep in mind, however, that not all backup solutions are made equal.
Many consumer-grade and “business-lite” backup solutions just back up data files, not your complete system. This is something to keep in mind when creating a disaster recovery plan. Your firm may have problems restoring data, apps, and operating systems if you don’t have access to all of them.
Ntiva uses enterprise-class, image-based cloud backup techniques that mirror (back up) your complete system, not just individual files, to avoid data loss and reduce operational risk. As a result, it should be one of the top priorities on your disaster recovery checklist.
We use the 3-2-1 rule of data backup as part of the IT disaster recovery plan template to ensure you always have a copy of your data ready for recovery from a recovery point.