A Business’s Essential Guide for Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan That Works

Businesses face any number of challenges day-to-day as they strive to manage and scale their operations. Whether planning their budgets, juggling time-consuming HR duties, or continuously looking for new revenue opportunities, there are often plenty of hurdles that need to be climbed.

However, when a major disruption takes place, such as a natural disaster or cybersecurity incident that compromises a business’s operational status, it can quickly shift an organization’s priorities.

In these situations, a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is vital. But how exactly should businesses format this type of plan, and what’s required to ensure it stays effective long-term? Below, we’ve created an essential guide you can follow to create your own disaster recovery plan.

Step 1. Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

Many businesses don’t readily recognize the number of risks or vulnerabilities they may have. This is why the first step of creating an effective disaster recovery plan is identifying and categorizing these potential setbacks based on their severity.

Start by evaluating your internal systems and protocols to look for potential weak spots. These “points of weakness” could be inadequate security protocols in system networks, a lack of adequate database backups in the event of power failures, or corrupted hardware.

Along with collecting a list of risks you’ll want to plan for, completing a BIA (Business Impact Analysis) can help you better quantify the potential consequences of those risks. This could include any financial losses that could be suffered from unexpected downtime or the possible impact disruptions could have on your customers or the vendors you work with.

Step 2. Setting Recovery Objectives

Establishing relevant recovery objectives is a fundamental element of effective disaster recovery planning. A recovery objective defines a specific benchmark that should be achieved when reestablishing normal business operations.

Most disaster recovery plans should have two primary objectives that should be understood by the businesses and well documented – RTO and RPO.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – This object will define the maximum amount of time a business’s core functions can be offline before it starts to cause unrepairable damage to an organization’s operational or financial state.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – This objective represents the maximum amount of data that can be lost after a disaster before it compromises the viability of the organization and its reputation.

Step 3. Developing Recovery Strategies

Once all applicable risks and recovery objectives surrounding them have been identified, now you can begin drafting various recovery strategies associated with them.

One way you start building your recovery strategy is to focus on the data backup and replication process. This involves creating redundant copies of your data and storing them in separate locations, ensuring you can restore information even if your primary systems fail.

You can also leverage cloud-based recovery services from a third-party provider that can support your recovery efforts if and when needed. Many cloud providers now offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) models that can replicate your entire business’s IT infrastructure, which can be invaluable when you need immediate system or application resources.

Step 4. Creating the Disaster Recovery Plan

In order for your disaster recovery plan to be effective when reducing downtime and restoring business systems to their full operational state, it’s important to keep your plan as comprehensive as possible.

To do this, you’ll want to make sure your disaster recovery plan contains the following information:

Important Contact Lists – This includes all relevant stakeholders who will be responsible for assisting in recovery efforts. This can include staff members, IT teams, third-party vendors, or emergency response teams.
Data Backup and Restoration Procedures – You should have step-by-step procedures documented for responding to different disaster types. This should cover everything from initial assessments to full system recovery.
Communication Strategies – Outline how you’ll communicate with employees, customers, and other stakeholders during a disaster. Include templates for messages, contact information for media outlets, and procedures for social media communication.
Alternative Working Arrangements – If a major disaster impacts your teams’ ability to carry out typical business operations, you’ll want to have alternative working arrangements in place for employees. These could be temporary offices or a specific disaster recovery site.
Vendor and Supplier Contact Information – Keep an easily accessible list of all vendors or suppliers handy, as this will help streamline communications during an outage.
Legal or Regulatory Requirements – It’s essential to know any legal or regulatory requirements related to disaster recovery and data protection. Your plan should address these considerations to ensure compliance.

Step 5. Testing and Maintaining the Plan

Some businesses may be fortunate enough to never have to use their disaster recovery plan. However, if they do, knowing the plan is still relevant is important.

Much like fire extinguishers need to be replaced periodically to ensure proper operation during an emergency, disaster recovery plans should be regularly tested and maintained.

You should look for opportunities to stage mock recovery drills with various stakeholders every year as well as work with third-party services to help you audit and improve your plans over time.

Step 6. Employee Training and Awareness

Your employees will play a critical role in helping you to safely recover your systems in the event of a major business disruption. Because of this fact, it’s important that all employees are adequately trained on how to execute various procedures associated with disaster recovery initiatives.

Regularly reinforce disaster recovery awareness. Conduct drills and exercises, share updates and reminders about the plan, and encourage open communication so employees feel comfortable asking questions and raising concerns.

Get the Disaster Recovery Planning Support Your Business Needs

Major disasters can happen any time and anywhere without warning. For businesses, it’s absolutely essential to have a plan in place to help reduce the impact of these disruptions, while ensuring they’re able to minimize the financial or reputational damage that can occur from lengthy downtime.

At LDD Consulting, we have the industry experience to help you develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that will keep your business protected. Our team of experts will work with you to assess your risks, identify your critical systems, and develop a plan that will ensure your business can continue to operate in the face of disaster.