How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster can happen to your business in countless ways. Not being prepared for these situations can make it even more challenging for your company to recover, whether it's a cybersecurity incident, natural disaster, or data breach. Staying proactive by developing a disaster recovery plan for these scenarios is essential in today's workplace. An IT team can work with your business in creating a detailed disaster recovery plan to limit downtime and help prepare your employees on how to best respond to these situations.

Here are a few tips on how an IT team can create a disaster recovery plan for your business.

Define Your Risks

The first phase in designing a disaster recovery plan is to define your risks. These risks may be a technical failure, natural disaster, cyber attack, or even a disgruntled employee. Understanding the various threats facing your business will help you make plans on limiting these vulnerabilities while also giving you the opportunity to create a strategy on how to respond to these different situations. Checking your plan and keeping it up to date is also important, as new threats continue to evolve at a rapid rate.

Prioritize Your Recovery Options

Not all data is created equal, and it's a good idea to prioritize your recovery options. Creating daily backups of critical data and uploading it to the cloud can help you avoid being a victim of a ransomware scheme. Investing in network monitoring can also help you locate any unusual activity ahead of time before it leads to a data breach or cybersecurity incident. Creating a plan on how to protect and recover your essential data is key for any business.

Create a Communications Plan

Staying in communication with other workers isn't always easy in the face of a disaster. For example, a hurricane can knock out your phone system, while a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack can overwhelm your servers. Purchasing a backup generator is an effective way to keep the power on while using any extra capacity for your server bandwidth can give you more time to communicate with others during a DDoS attack. Ultimately, finding alternative ways to communicate is critical in directing your employees on how to respond to these ever-changing situations.

Discuss Responsibilities for Employees

A disaster recovery plan needs to explain the responsibilities of each employee. Laying out these responsibilities will help prepare your business for a wide range of situations. Practicing different scenarios will help prepare your employees on how to respond during a disaster. These practice situations are great learning opportunities, and they will help you identify any areas of concern that need to be fixed to ensure your business is well-protected.

Preparing for disasters is critical for businesses in all types of industries. Creating a detailed disaster recovery plan with your IT team can help you stay proactive for a wide range of scenarios. Defining your risks, prioritizing your recovery options, staying in communication, and discussing responsibilities with your employees are all critical aspects of creating a disaster recovery plan for your business.