Business continuity plans (BCP) are a necessary reality to ensure any business can survive disruptions to their operational infrastructure. These plans provide the necessary scaffolding businesses need to maintain communication with their customers throughout a crisis event. A well structured BCP includes a business resumption plan, an occupant emergency plan, a continuity of operations plan, an incident management plan, and a disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery plans are especially important to the stability of a business’s IT infrastructure in the wake of a disaster event, given that cybersecurity threats have become increasingly diverse and prevalent over the last decade. As threat actors have leaned into multi-stage attacks and ransomware attacks, the costs to businesses dealing with those breaches have only escalated.
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 reached $4.45 million, up 15% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. [1] The uptick in potential financial and reputational damage has inspired many organizations to increase investment into IT security and recovery measures, including expanding and improving disaster recovery plans, to mitigate and minimize fallout from incidents of all types.
What is an IT disaster recovery plan?
IT disaster recovery plans are official documents consisting of a series of responses and actions structured to ensure business continuity of crucial technology infrastructure and systems following natural disasters, a failure in software or hardware systems, or the fallout resulting from a cyberattack.
What are the benefits of an IT disaster recovery plan?
There are significant benefits to crafting and implementing an IT disaster recovery plan. Recovery plans help to:
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- Minimize downtime from a disaster event and ensure maximum ongoing availability of IT systems and hardware.
- Reduce the financial impact of the event by decreasing the time spent responding and the resources used in the recovery process.
- Protect the brand’s overall reputation.
- Improve the overall security of the company’s IT infrastructure.
- Ensure a company is compliant with current legislative and regulatory requirements to protect consumer rights and privacy.
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What can happen to an unprepared SMB that suffers an IT disaster?
Regardless of the cause of an IT disaster, the impact is often the loss of access to crucial client data and disruption in access to crucial technology systems and infrastructure. Losing access to these resources will lead to an inability to meet customer expectations and could even over time damage a business’s reputation. This can especially be true if the company hasn’t taken the necessary steps to protect their clients.
What must an IT disaster recovery plan include?
While IT disaster recovery plans are a part of a larger business continuity plan (BCP), and your organization might have specific requirements that expand the scope, there are certain elements that the recovery plan must include to be successful.
Established recovery goals
The combination of your IT infrastructure and your standard customer-focused business practices determine which of your systems need to be prioritized in the event of a disaster and the timeline in which you need to accomplish your recovery efforts. This timeline is based upon how long your business can absorb the lost revenue that downtime causes.
Within your goals, you should also fold in your organization’s data backup practices. Your recovery plan should define how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster event, and your data backup practices should be structured to ensure this outcome. For example, if your business can only absorb the loss of an hour of current data, your backup systems should run hourly and include redundancy to ensure data recovery is possible following a disaster event.
Personnel roles
Disaster events can introduce chaos and disruption into the daily workflow of your staff. Your recovery plan must lay out in detail the roles and responsibilities of your personnel in the event of an emergency. Because disaster events and security breaches might impact your personnel in different ways, your personnel plan should assign back-ups for vital recovery roles in the event key personnel are unavailable.
Complete IT inventory
The success of your disaster recovery plan is contingent upon your ability to know what systems and hardware are impacted by a disaster event. This requires a full accounting of the company’s hardware, software, and any cloud-based assets. In addition to the inventory, each asset should include a ranking of how critical it is to the operation, and whether it’s in use through a service provider, whether it’s leased, or if it’s owned by the business directly.
IT backup methods
Just as crucial as the IT inventory, a roadmap of your backup procedures provides your recovery team with knowledge of what data is stored on what systems, the backup schedule, how your data is structured on your network, and how data from each system can be recovered.
Your data backup plan should establish a designated remote location as a fallback recovery site. This is a location where data is backed up to or can be retrieved from in the event of a crisis. This site could be home to redundant critical systems so as to mitigate the downtime on core systems as much as possible.
Backup sites come in three configurations.
- Cold recovery sites provide the bare minimum of power and network access. Hardware must be brought and data installed, which could impede the recovery process.
- Warm recovery sites include storage hardware and are considered ready for use, but are not the official backup sites for the company’s data, so time still must be taken to upload and restore systems to storage devices in order to regain full functionality.
- Hot recovery sites are fully functional backup sites and are already being used by the organization as a mirror site for data recovery.
Disaster recovery procedures
While data recovery is its own process, your recovery plan should include recovery procedures for the remainder of your IT infrastructure. This portion of the plan should include responses to specific disasters, methods for mitigating damage under specific circumstances, and rules for when off-schedule backups should be performed.
Disaster-specific restoration guidelines
The bulk of a properly structured disaster recovery plan consists of a detailed action plan that combines the above steps into unique recovery plans for each type of possible disaster event. Each plan is unique because each type of disaster requires specific actions to be taken in order to protect and recover impacted systems.
It’s important for these plans to also include public relations and media communications guidelines in the event that client data is compromised in any way. Clear communications and information dissemination guidelines help to mitigate the fallout of negative press and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements around cyberattacks.
Types of IT disasters and the damage they can cause
Disaster recovery plans cover a wide array of disaster events, so as to ensure business continuity regardless of the type of crisis a business faces.
Natural disasters
Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, flooding, and severe storms, can be extremely disruptive when they do occur, destroying or damaging office space, including onsite hardware. They can also disrupt power and lead to network outages.
These events can cause data loss and disruption of backup procedures. Such disruptions can force a business to shift operations to alternative sites and face the additional costs of recovery at a time when income streams might be disrupted.
Technological disasters
Hardware failures such as server failures or network outages, including a disconnect due to local or remote power failures, can lead to data loss or corruption. These events can also cause business disruption and an inability to communicate with customers, and if the failure is with onsite, company-owned equipment, it can also lead to costly repairs or hardware replacements in order to fully recover and resume operations.
Malicious actors
The annual cost of cybercrime is anticipated globally to reach an astounding $10.5 trillion by the year 2025, an increase of more than 300% over ten years.[2] Cyberattacks take a number of forms, but the most popular attacks over the last few years have been ransomware and social engineering attacks designed to gain access to and compromise private consumer data.
How to create an IT disaster recovery plan
The elements of a well-structured IT disaster recovery plan laid out above require an organization to follow a number of steps in order to gather the necessary information.
Business impact analysis and risk assessment
Performing a business impact analysis allows your team to determine the impact any potential disaster would have on each business process. Scenarios can be tested against recovery procedures in order to establish tactics for handling each type of disaster and craft realistic goals to be accomplished in the process.
Determine which business processes are critical
As your team establishes plans for each disaster scenario, you should determine which business processes are crucial for each department and prioritize them in the recovery process. Each system and process should have an established contingency included in the planning in the event critical systems cannot be restored. This step will help to create your list of employee stakeholders who will be responsible for each recovery task.
This step of the process should determine changes to standard operating procedures that might need to be made, and what conditions would trigger the implementation of emergency procedures. At this stage, your team should be performing inventories of hardware and software assets, determining backup methods and schedules, and identifying recovery locations.
Establish recovery plan objectives
Once you’ve established critical processes for each scenario, you should attach recovery time objectives to each process in order to minimize the financial impact of the disaster. You would also establish your recovery point objectives at this stage in the planning process, which will set the acceptable amount of data your company can afford to lose before being negatively impacted by the event.
Combine data into an official company document—test and revise
The end goal of this process is to create an official document that can be quickly and easily accessed by all stakeholders with a role in the disaster recovery process.
Mistakes to avoid when creating your IT disaster recovery plan
Each of the steps that we’ve outlined above are crucial in establishing an effective disaster recovery plan. Specialists point to several common mistakes business owners and leadership make when creating these plans:[3]
- A poorly executed risk assessment can lead to your team failing to properly assess and enumerate the risks that could potentially impact your business, leaving gaps in your recovery plan.
- Improperly prioritizing assets could hinder or even cause your recovery plan to fail.
- Failing to incorporate sufficient cybersecurity into your operations and recovery plan can leave your business vulnerable to disaster events.
- While the purpose of the disaster plan is to establish an understanding of your infrastructure, disaster events impact your employees as well. Don’t neglect their roles and needs in the planning process.
- These plans are not static tools, but should be treated as living documents that need to be tested, updated, and maintained on an ongoing basis to keep them current with the organization’s infrastructure and regulatory requirements.
Tools and resources to support an IT disaster recovery plan
Disaster recovery planning is an extremely important element of a properly structured BCP. In order to execute the planning process, many business owners and IT professionals rely upon a number of software and hardware resources.
Backup and recovery infrastructure
At the very core of disaster recovery planning is the ability to backup and retrieve data and software applications in use by a company. Backup and recovery tools, in order to properly adhere to the spirit of disaster recovery planning, should be off-site solutions and should incorporate several layers of redundancy in order to truly provide a reliable solution.
Whether in the form of a software platform or through a cloud-based solution, storage solutions come with a range of options as to the frequency backups are performed, the speed and ease with which data can be retrieved, and the security of the systems involved.
Replication and failover solutions
Minimizing downtime and data loss while maximizing your ability to maintain maximum availability of your services is the entire goal of your overall BCP and your disaster recovery plan specifically. In order to accomplish an almost seamless changeover to backup data during a crisis event, businesses rely upon tools that allow a full mirroring of your systems and database.
The ability to switch between live copies of your data in the event of a failure of systems or outage is accomplished through the use of tools capable of replicating databases and servers.
Business continuity management tools
Because disaster recovery planning is a major component of a complete business continuity plan, business owners must be able to integrate and align the different parts of a BC plan into a cohesive whole.
Using BC management platforms can provide prompts and guidance to plan, manage, and execute disaster recovery strategies based on your company’s assets. These tools provide visibility and structure for professionals responsible for BC planning.
Monitoring and testing tools
Because your disaster recovery plan is a living document, you need tools to monitor and test the efficacy and functionality of your data recovery (DR) plan based on specific scenarios. The effectiveness of your DR plan is dependent on your team’s ability to meet your recovery objectives, including your recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) in the event of a crisis. Monitoring and testing tools provide metrics and reporting that help streamline and improve your recovery plans.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
Offered as a cloud-based solution, DRaaS providers offer end-to-end disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. This includes managing and maintaining backups, replication and failover capabilities, system testing, and monitoring and reporting.
Service providers of DRaaS solutions simplify and automate extremely complex IT functions, freeing up your resources to focus on other business processes. This reduces costs and operational complexity while allowing businesses to grow and evolve through cloud-based systems.
Adopt strong disaster recovery planning practices
The ability to ensure business continuity in the wake of a crisis event can mean the difference between a company surviving the fallout or closing its doors permanently. Having a well-planned, structured IT disaster recovery plan as part of your overall business continuity planning is essential in an economic landscape so dependent upon our information systems when cybercrime is so rampant.
If you don’t already have an IT disaster recovery plan in place, or you’re looking to partner with an agency that can help you craft one specific to your organization’s needs, reach out to a top-rated IT service consultant and find out what they can do to help your company protect itself.
FAQ about IT Disaster Recovery Planning
What is the most important consideration in a disaster recovery plan?
When constructing your disaster recovery plan around business continuity, your IT systems must be a priority. This means that you must ensure that you have a plan to regain connectivity, that your data is protected and accessible, and that your systems are either accessible or replicable through mirroring, so as to minimize any disruption in the performance of your daily operations.
What is the role of an IT manager or IT service provider in DRP?
The individual or service provider responsible for overseeing and managing your IT disaster recovery plan should be monitoring and testing systems, making necessary updates and changes to the information used to keep the plan viable, and working with vendors and other service providers to keep IT systems functioning and accessible in the event of a crisis.
What organizational functions should be involved in disaster recovery planning?
While your IT management team should lead the recovery process, you should also have representatives from across the organization responsible for management, risk management, personnel, and HR, records and data management, communications and PR, and facility management. This ensures all relevant business processes are addressed during a crisis.