Disaster can strike at any time, even for the most fortified and resilient organizations. No business, whether a multinational giant or a small to mid-sized company, can predict every event. It might be a cyberattack, a natural disaster, or a critical systems failure, but when it happens, the goal remains the same: recovery.
Every single organization needs to have a disaster recovery plan in place. In the event of a disaster, businesses need to seamlessly roll out their IT disaster recovery plan. Those that don’t have a strong disaster recovery plan can potentially face irreparable damage.
When we talk about disaster recovery, there’s often a misconception that it simply involves data backups. While backing up sensitive data is a crucial aspect of effective disaster recovery, there’s far more to it than meets the eye. Getting disaster recovery right can be the difference between succeeding and perishing in a fiercely competitive and highly volatile digital world.
In this article, we’ll provide a 101 on disaster recovery strategies and walk you through developing a strong disaster recovery plan.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan, sometimes referred to as a DR plan or DRP, is a meticulous step-by-step plan for a business to implement to get back to normal operations after disruptive events. By 2028, the worldwide disaster-recovery-as-a-service market will hit $26.5 billion.
A good disaster recovery plan focuses on getting critical data, infrastructure (both cloud services and on-premises), and other IT systems up and running after any kind of disaster scenario. Disaster recovery plans are typically a core component of an overarching business continuity plan, sometimes known as a BCP. A business continuity plan is typically a high-level document, whereas disaster recovery plans zero in on the more technical aspects of restoring business operations.
Another misconception is that disaster recovery plans solely involve responding to different types of disasters. The best disaster recovery plans focus on the 3 Ps: preparation, prediction, and prevention, rather than just focusing on incident response.
What are the Benefits of an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan?
Let’s take a look at some ways a solid disaster recovery plan can help your business:
Enhance Compliance Posture
Most compliance standards, like GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI DSS, require businesses to have streamlined and rapid recovery procedures in case of a disaster. Disaster recovery plans can help you meet today’s most pressing compliance requirements.
Minimize Losses
Disasters can have severe long-term financial implications, which small and medium businesses may struggle to overcome. With a good disaster recovery plan, you can significantly reduce the margin of financial losses.
Protect Brand Reputation
All enterprises are judged by how well they respond to difficult situations. Organizations with strong preparedness and optimized disaster recovery plans will gain more respect from customers, clients, and peers.
Boost Employee Morale
Without strong disaster recovery plans, IT teams may constantly worry about the possibility of a disaster and how they should handle it. When there’s a disaster recovery plan in place with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, IT teams can go about their day-to-day activities without the fear of facing overwhelming disasters.
Optimize Data Protection
As we know, data is the most precious asset for most organizations. During disaster scenarios, businesses with good recovery strategies can quickly recover data from compromised critical applications.
Reduce Disruptions and Downtime
With good disaster recovery procedures in place, businesses can seamlessly get back to normal operations, with either zero or minimal service disruptions and downtime. This is essential to stay competitive in a world where customers have no tolerance for disruptions and fractured services.
What Should a Disaster Recovery Plan Have?
When it comes to disaster recovery plans, it’s important to remember that there’s no single template. Every enterprise must craft disaster recovery processes that align with its IT infrastructure, business context, and objectives. That said, there are a few core components that most disaster recovery plans should include:
Inventory of Tech Stack
For optimal disaster recovery, you need to create a comprehensive inventory of your tech resources. This includes everything from hardware and software applications to data and third-party services. It’s important to classify these assets based on criticality.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
In your disaster recovery plan, you should weigh up different kinds of disaster scenarios and measure what kind of impact they might have on operations. By doing so, you will get a clear picture of what risks are the most dangerous.
Data Backup Processes
One of the primary recovery objectives for any organization should be to restore sensitive data that may have been compromised during a disaster. A disaster recovery plan should clearly define backup procedures, how often data will be backed up, and where it will be stored (on-site, off-site, or in the cloud).
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO describes the amount of data you can afford to lose during recovery efforts. Setting an RPO helps you figure out how often you need to back up your data so you’re not losing more than your business can handle.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO refers to the maximum amount of acceptable downtime that you are willing to undergo while recovering critical systems after an incident.
IT Team Responsibilities
A disaster recovery plan must clearly spell out what each disaster recovery team member is expected to do during a recovery effort. This is crucial because it takes a highly orchestrated effort involving all team members to get critical systems and data up and running again.
Recovery Sites
You need to create and store multiple copies of your data across different disaster recovery sites. This is known as data redundancy and helps greatly when data needs to be restored swiftly. In your disaster recovery plan, you should include where the data should be stored and what security measures should be introduced to protect it.
Communication Channels
If your business experiences a disaster, it’s important to have a well-defined communication plan so that critical teams, key stakeholders, employees, and customers are notified on time. If your disaster recovery plan tackles this aspect effectively, you can sidestep reputational harm and legal complications.
Testing
No matter how well-defined a disaster recovery plan is on paper, it’s absolutely essential to run real-world drills to test its efficacy. Each drill offers an opportunity to further enhance disaster recovery procedures.
Supply Chain Risk Management
Your operations likely depend on a wide variety of services from diverse IT providers. If any part of your supply chain experiences a disaster, it can have major implications for your business. Likewise, if your business experiences a disruption, there must be a clearly defined process for reactivating third-party services to ensure continuity.
An effective disaster recovery plan should include contact information for third-party vendors, service-level agreements (SLAs) that include uptime guarantees, and emergency response plans.
When Should a Disaster Recovery Plan Get Activated?
Having a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan is one half of the puzzle. But it’s equally important to know when that plan needs to kick into action. Saying “…when disaster strikes” is technically correct, but you should know what specific kinds of disaster scenarios demand the rollout of recovery plans.
Let’s take a look at some common disaster scenarios:
Security Breaches
Malware, ransomware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and social engineering attackslike phishing are some of the many kinds of cyberattacks that can result in cybersecurity breaches, data theft, and downtime.
Power Outages
Any kind of power failure that lasts an abnormal duration can have an impact on cloud services, IT servers, and network infrastructure. Unplanned electrical outages may compromise system availability and result in the loss of valuable data.
Human Error
Employees continue to simultaneously be the most valuable and vulnerable part of a business. Disaster could strike if employees accidentally corrupt or delete sensitive information or inadvertently help threat actors conduct data breaches.
Natural Disasters
Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, and fires, albeit rare, can devastate critical IT infrastructure and cause severe service disruptions and downtime. For businesses operating in disaster-prone areas, this is a particularly serious concern.
Critical Systems Failure:
All technology, both hardware and software, is prone to eventual failure or fluctuations in performance. When this happens to critical systems, it can affect databases and storage systems and prevent users from accessing services.
Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan: A Step-By-Step Guide
Creating a disaster recovery plan that covers all bases might seem complex and difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s a guide that can help simplify and streamline that process for you.
Define Your Disaster Recovery Goals and Objectives
An effective disaster recovery plan can help businesses save millions of dollars in potential damages and losses. From the very beginning, a disaster recovery plan should be guided by a well-structured strategy. In this step, you need to answer the following questions:
- What are the main objectives of your disaster recovery plan?
- What does systems recovery mean to your organization? Is it a complete restoration of services or a more granular restoration?
- How much risk are you willing to accept? What’s your RTO and RPO?
- What compliance requirements do you need to adhere to after experiencing a disruptive event?
- How does your disaster recovery plan connect to your business continuity plan?
- What are your business-specific KPIs and metrics to assess the efficacy of your disaster recovery plan?
Conduct a Comprehensive Risk Assessment
Your second step involves analyzing multiple disaster scenarios to see which of them could have the most impact on your organization. Parallelly, you need to audit your IT infrastructure and make an inventory of every single service, resource, and asset across your cloud environments and on-premises data centers.
Identify every single risk across your tech stack during this step because, in the next step, you’ll have to evaluate which risks are most dangerous to your organization.
Still confused about how to proceed? Here’s a simple breakdown:
- Account for every possible disaster scenario
- Audit your entire IT stack
- Create a topology of dependencies
- Make a list of all risks across your resources
- Document your risk findings in a clear and in-depth assessment report
Pro tip: Collaborate with key stakeholders in your organization and supply chain during this process. It’s important to view disaster recovery from as many perspectives as possible to create the optimal plan.
Pinpoint Critical Systems
Once your risk assessment is complete, it’s time to conduct a business impact analysis. In other words, you need to identify critical operations that align with your overarching business continuity plan.
After Step 2, you’ll have a comprehensive list of IT services, assets, resources, and workflows. In this step, you have to establish risk levels for each of these. That’s because your disaster recovery plan needs to revolve around mission-critical applications, sensitive data, and other crown jewels.
How do you know what’s critical? Find out by answering these simple questions:
- Which IT systems need to be working for your daily operations to run seamlessly?
- Which of your IT assets and processes have the biggest financial impact?
- Which IT systems are customer-facing and in public view?
- Which IT systems would cause the most financial harm or disrepute if it’s down?
- Which systems do IT teams rely on for daily collaboration and communication?
- Which system failures are the most concerning from a regulatory standpoint?
Design Your Data Security and Backup Plan
While outlining your disaster recovery plan, remember that one of your main goals is to minimize data loss. This step focuses on protecting and backing up sensitive data so that you can quickly restore it after an incident.
Here’s a list of questions that can help:
- Where is your data going to be backed up? On-site, off-site, cloud, or hybrid environments?
- What kind of data backups are you performing? Full backups or incremental backups?
- Does your backup frequency match your RPO?
- What data protections are your data backups going to have? Encryption, role-based access controls, and multi-factor authentication?
- Are your data backup and security plans comprehensively detailed in audit-ready documents?
- Are you going to use AI-driven automation capabilities to restore data without too much manual intervention?
Assemble a Highly Qualified Disaster Recovery Team
It doesn’t matter how good your disaster recovery plan is if you don’t have the right team to execute it. Once you put together the right team, it’s equally important to create communication channels. This will help ensure orchestrated and efficient mitigation of critical issues.
Break this step into the following actions:
- Make sure your disaster recovery team has strong leaders and a mix of IT and cybersecurity experts.
- Establish escalation paths so that high-level leaders and key stakeholders across the recovery chain can seamlessly collaborate.
- Create a list containing the contact information of every member of your disaster recovery team and supply chain.
- Create email chains, text chains, or groups on collaboration apps so that all key stakeholders can share critical recovery information.
- Keep message templates ready so that no one has to compose long documents during time-sensitive crises.
Establish Critical Systems Recovery Procedures
When you’re dealing with hardware failure or software issues, you need to establish procedures that can guarantee seamless failover. These procedures need to be meticulously documented and easy to follow because, once disaster strikes, recovery needs to be rapid.
Actionable items:
- Make sure that every critical system has a dedicated recovery playbook with detailed instructions.
- Include an appendix in every playbook that includes whatever credentials, dependencies, and tooling may be required for recovery.
- Regularly test the efficiency of playbooks and don’t be conservative with how often you optimize them.
- Make sure that resources and documents for critical systems recovery procedures are easily accessible.
Review and Proactively Improve the Plan
Even though we’ve reached the end of the list, you must remember that developing your disaster recovery plan doesn’t stop here. Once all the moving parts are lined up and ready, it’s time for you to test the plan. The best way to do this is to conduct disaster simulations and see how your recovery procedures and backup mechanisms respond.
One last cheat sheet before we sign off:
- Conduct periodic disaster recovery simulations and tests.
- Analyze the results of that test to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
- Adjust your disaster recovery processes based on what worked and what didn’t.
- Create new or updated documents that include what iterative changes you’ve made.
Conclusion
In today’s disaster-prone world, businesses have a lot on their hands. Regulators and customers demand high availability, seamless performance, and minimal disruptions. And no matter what industry a business works in, whether it’s manufacturing, education, or healthcare, they have to protect sensitive data and critical systems at all costs. To do all this, it’s essential to have a strong disaster recovery plan in place.
Disaster recovery plans can provide many advantages like reduced downtime, financial losses, and reputational harm. To create a strong plan, businesses should follow the 7 steps outlined in this article, which begins with establishing high-level objectives and concludes with meticulous testing and continuous optimization.
If this seems like a bit too much to tackle internally, businesses should consider using the services of a third-party disaster recovery solutions provider. By doing so, they can collaborate with experts to develop a bulletproof disaster recovery plan that can help them easily recover from even the worst of incidents.
