Planning in Advance: Here’s What You Need to Design a 5-Step IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Whatever your size of the business, you will most likely rely heavily on software and accurate data. If the security of that vital information compromised in some way, it could create some severe operational problems in the absence of a viable backup plan.

Reliable and professional IT support for companies are available, and it is well worth considering along with a disaster recovery plan that allows your business to pick up the pieces quickly when something goes wrong.

Here are any tips on how to build that all-important IT disaster recovery plan.

1. Start by identifying the threats.

The only way you can successfully manage risk is to identify the potential threats your business faces so that you can formulate a specific strategy to counteract these vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure.

Your disaster recovery plan needs to have a clear vision that shows how you will contend with a severe threat to your data security and systems.

2. Allocate responsibility

As well as having a clear plan that identifies threats to your system, it would help if you also considered who will form part of your disaster recovery team and what specific responsibilities each one will take.

It would be prudent to include IT professionals in the team structure and to have designated tasks for each member so that everyone knows what to do if disaster strikes.

3. Restoring data

A fundamental aspect of any disaster recovery plan involves a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

An RPO revolves around how often you backup your data and determining how far back you go with your data restore point.

In line with creating an RPO, you should also look at working out how long your business can tolerate a system that is down.

4. A cost-effective backup solution

It is very affordable these days to have a cloud-based backup option, and this is something that should be considered as an essential component of your IT disaster recovery plan.

You will need to ensure that the security of your data is not compromised online, but you can quickly get guidance on how to create robust security protocols.

5. Test your plan

If you have put in all of the right groundwork and created an IT disaster recovery plan, you will want to know what the project is viable and deals with threats you have identified.

Take steps to test whether your plan delivers the intended results in the event of an IT meltdown or security breach.

Aim to test your plan through each designated step and make adjustments where required if you spot any potential issues or weaknesses that need resolving.

It stands to reason that if you have gone to considerable effort to draw up a plan that deals with a potential worst-case scenario, you need to know that everything works as expected. It is better to know that now rather than finding out in an emergency.

Talk to an IT professional and formulate a viable disaster recovery plan if you want to ensure that your business won’t be too severely affected by an unexpected IT problem.