Disaster Recovery Steps To Take Now While You Build A Plan

Most business leaders don’t relish the idea of the possibility that disaster will strike their organization. Whether it’s a natural or man-made disaster, the ramifications can be equally damaging. At a minimum, disasters of either kind can cause downtime, damage to your reputation, and financial loss.

Disaster recovery steps 

Do an inventory of the property

A disaster recovery plan should always start with an inventory of all your IT assets. This is necessary to unravel the complexity of your environment. Start by listing all assets under IT management, including all servers, storage devices, applications, data, network switches, access points, and network devices.

Conduct a risk assessment

Once you’ve mapped all your IT assets, networks and their dependencies, go through them and list the internal and external threats to each of those assets. These threats can include natural disasters or mundane IT failures.

Define application and data criticality

Before you start building an IT disaster recovery plan, you need to classify your data and applications according to their criticality.

Define recovery goals

Different classes will have different recovery goals. a critical e-commerce database may be recovery critical and have very aggressive recovery goals because the business simply can’t afford to lose any transactions or be out long-term.

Determine right tools and techniques

The good news is that there are a wide variety of solutions on the market today. Just make sure that what you choose offers the appropriate level of protection. Too much protection can cost a company unnecessary money and introduce unnecessary complexity.

Get stakeholder buy-in

Go beyond the walls of the data center and engage key stakeholders for all your business units. They need to be involved in the planning phase. And they should agree with you on the company’s priorities and service level agreements that your team will deliver. 

Document and communicate your plan

In the event of a disaster, you need a documented strategy for getting back up and running. This document should be written for the people who will use it. All too often, only one person in an organization really knows the whole picture, leaving the organization vulnerable if that person is unavailable during a disaster.

Test and practice your DR plan

No organization will ever get their disaster plan perfect, but practice will help you find and fix problems in your plan, as well as allow you to execute it faster and more accurately. You don’t need to rehearse the entire disaster recovery plan every time.

Evaluate and update your plan

The DR plan should be a living document. It is especially important to periodically revise your plan in light of the shifting sands of an ever-changing business environment. Tolerance for outages and data loss may decrease. IT may migrate to new hardware or operating systems. A company may acquire another company.

Conclusion

Creating a strong and resilient disaster recovery plan is essential. After reading this article, you’ll know the topics to include in your plan: IT inventory, data backup and validation, recovery timeline, detailed liability, physical damage, insider threats, insurance, validation, business continuity plan, and updates.