When talking about disasters, many people tend to think of natural catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, or fires. In the cybersecurity world, however, not all disasters are natural. A lot of man-made disasters result in damaged data or leave crucial assets non-functional. And their impacts are highly detrimental.

To protect your business, you need to have in place a disaster recovery plan (also known as a "DR plan" or “DRP”) as part of your critical risk mitigation strategy, regardless of whether your company is facing a natural catastrophe or a cybersecurity threat.

But what is a disaster recovery plan? How can you develop a disaster recovery plan for your company?

Disrupted events can lead to the loss of finance and customer trust. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a policy or process designed to instruct an organisation on how to respond to unplanned events, such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, etc.

The plan helps the organisation minimise the damage from disaster scenarios and quickly resume operations. To effectively develop a DRP, businesses should make a detailed plan, including the location, the types of disaster, and step-by-step instructions to ensure employees can easily carry them out when disasters strike.

The format of a disaster recovery plan may vary from one organisation to another, but the structure of the disaster recovery plan should include these key features:

1. Goals

Organisations should make a list which includes goals they want to achieve during or after a disaster. In particular, the list must have:

• The recovery time objective (RTO): the acceptable period after a disaster. After this period, businesses must resume their operations.
• And the recovery point objective (RPO) refers to data that a company is willing to lose after a disaster occurs.

2. Personnel

One feature that a DRP must have is personnel. Personnel is the people who are responsible for carrying out DRP, and they make provisions for specific employees that are unavailable.

3. IT inventory

An IT inventory should include information on all hardware and software programs, as well as any cloud services that are required for the organisation's operations.

4. Backup procedures

The DRP must identify where each data resource is backed up and on which devices, as well as how to recover from backup resources.

Preparing a disaster recovery plan ensures business continuity and benefits you in a variety of ways. The following are the top three advantages of disaster recovery planning:

1. Increased productivity

A DRP has to be assigned to the right people with the right responsibilities.

A disaster recovery plan can have at least two people responsible for the same task. In the long term, such redundancies can be quite useful as organisations don’t need to worry about the network's overall integrity when many staff are capable of completing a particular task. Furthermore, if someone is on vacation or annual leave, the business will still have someone qualified to handle the work.

2. Cost efficiency

DRPs reduce business operation costs thanks to prevention, detection and correction measures. With prevention measures, human errors are less likely to occur. If problems do happen, detection measures will promptly identify them, while correction steps will help recover lost data and allow for a speedy return to normal operations.

Ensuring systems and software are in good condition and up-to-date through rigorous maintenance procedures such as continuously maintaining systems, actively analysing high-level risks, and implementing the latest cybersecurity solutions can save businesses valuable time and resources.

Adopting cloud-based data management as part of a recovery strategy can lower backup and maintenance expenses even more.

3. Better customer retention

Clients nowadays want nothing less than quality and reliability, and they can be unforgiving if failures or downtime occur. They will simply find another service provider if a company fails to meet their demands.

A disaster recovery plan can help businesses maintain a high level of service quality regardless of the conditions. Retaining existing customers may be impossible in the aftermath of an IT disaster because they are already heavily affected by downtime.

By lowering the risk of downtime and data loss, your customers can rest assured that they will receive appropriate service even when an IT disaster arises. As a result, a disaster recovery plan is one of the most important aspects of long-term client retention.

DRPs can be established for a specific situation. Here are some common disaster recovery plans:

1. Virtualised disaster recovery plan

Virtualisation enables a disaster recovery plan to be implemented effectively and quickly. A virtualised environment can create new virtual machine (VM) instances and provide high availability for application recovery. However, the strategy must be able to verify that applications can be operated in disaster recovery mode and returned to regular operations within the RPO and RTO.

2. Network disaster recovery plan

Developing a recovery plan for a network is becoming challenging as today’s network is more sophisticated than ever. It is critical to explain the recovery procedure step by step, test it carefully, and keep it up-to-date. The data in this strategy will be network-specific, such as performance and networking personnel.

3. Cloud disaster recovery plan

Disaster recovery in the cloud can range from a simple file backup to a complete system. A cloud disaster plan can save space, time, and money, but it requires adequate administration to keep the disaster recovery strategy running. Organisations must be aware of the physical and virtual server locations. The plan needs to encompass various security issues, which is maybe minimised via testing.

4. Data centre disaster recovery plan

This strategy focuses only on the data centre facilities and infrastructure. A crucial component of data centre DRPs is an operational risk assessment where it addresses different scenarios and aspects like the building location, working space, power system, security, etc. A wide of scenarios must be addressed in the strategy.

Here are 5 steps you can follow to build a DRP for your business.

1. Create an inventory

Companies should know exactly which IT systems, hardware and software are important to maintain their business operation. Besides a simple inventory, the more different scenarios are added to your DRP, the more helpful it will be in the future. Consider which systems might be impacted if your business was hit by a flood, hurricane, fire, or power outage.

2. Make a recovery timeline

Businesses need to make a timeline for each recovery goal, including which period certain systems need to be back in operation. Every industry has its own timeframe for recovery. For example, in the healthcare sector, it may take a few minutes, but other industries may endure longer recovery times.

3. Create a communication plan

No matter what kind of disaster happens, having a communication plan is vital for your company’s continuity. Employees have to be aware of what kinds of operations may be affected, which plan should be implemented next, and who is responsible for what steps. As a result, businesses should assign specific people to roles.

Consider making an action plan to ensure that customers are aware of the situation and how to contact your organisation in case it must be closed or relocated.

4. Back up business data

There are many options to help a company back up its data, such as cloud storage, internal off-site data backups, and vendor-supported backups. Physical and cloud backups both have their drawbacks. Working with a reputable managed services provider can assist you in weighing the options and determining which is the best fit for your needs.

Not all business data should be backed up. An organisation should also identify which applications and data are mission-critical during the inventory step. It's crucial to know what data is static and unchanging, as this will determine if you need to back it up more than once.

5. Test your disaster recovery plan

Your disaster recovery plan should be tested at least once or twice a year. If the DRPs are not tested for several years, businesses can realise that all of their drives failed while trying to recover plans. The data would have been gone forever if this had happened during a true disaster.

Any mistakes discovered during these testing should be thoroughly recorded and addressed. If you identify any gaps in the plan, such as communication gaps or other issues, you can strengthen your plan with additional steps.

A DRP is crucial for any organisation. It can help your business save both time and reputation. No company, including yours, is immune to catastrophes and the value of having a detailed disaster recovery plan cannot be underestimated.