Disaster recovery is one aspect of business continuity. As a business owner or manager, it’s crucial that you understand how to assess your risk and implement a plan to get back to business as usual in the midst of an unexpected event, such as a cyber breach or Act of God.
Disruptive Events
There are many different disruptive events that might trigger the need for a disaster recovery plan. These include things like floods, fires, and earthquakes, and also cyber attacks, human error, and even long-term power outages. ITC can help you define the scope of your plan, which is based on everything from your industry and location to potential threats your business faces.
Five Steps To An Effective Plan
While the overall scope of your disaster recovery plan will vary, there are a few common factors for all businesses. These five steps are:
- Conduct a risk assessment. To create your disaster recovery plan, you have to identify potential threats. As mentioned before, cyber attacks and acts of God fall into this category. You’ll also need to analyze the potential impact of these threats, such as financial loss, reputational damage, downtime, and data loss.
- Define your recovery. Defining your recovery means knowing your time objectives and point objectives. This is the timeline you would like to be recovered by and the milestones by which you’ll measure your success.
- Develop a business continuity plan. Your business continuity plan will help you continue to run while implementing your disaster recovery efforts. This should include communication, alternative work locations, and system backups.
- Have an IT recovery plan. Your information technology infrastructure is one of the most vulnerable areas of any business. Make sure that your hardware and software recovery is outlined and fully understood by your IT team. This team will also need to have access to your data recovery options and have a way to restore your network.
- Test and train. Your disaster recovery plan is not something you write down and forget about. Work with your IT team at ITC to test your plan so that you can seamlessly put it into place when real disasters strike.
Failure to have a disaster recovery plan is planning to let disasters take you down. Contact ITC today, and let our professionals help you assess and implement potential problems so that you can stay up and running no matter what.
