Did you know that 93% of small businesses who don't have a disaster recovery strategy in place when they have a data disaster go out of business within a year? Despite this, 68 percent of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan.
In today’s world, losing access to your company’s data could mean losing everything. That implies that, as data becomes a more valuable commodity for organisations of all types and sizes, having a plan in place for if and when your company suffers a data disaster is essential.
Don’t be alarmed if the prospect of protecting your company against a data disaster seems onerous. You can ensure that your company is ready to take on the challenge by following the procedures outlined in this article.
However, before we actually get into those steps, there is one distinction you should understand: the difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan. A business continuity plan is primarily proactive, in that it is a strategy by which a business can continue to operate no matter what kind of disaster or setback befalls it. A disaster recovery plan is primarily reactive and has to do with how a business acts immediately following a disaster of some sort – in this case, a data disaster.
So, now that we’re clear on what a disaster recovery plan is, here are the steps your business can take to create one that works for you and your employees.
Step 1: Rally The Troops And Assess Your Equipment
Everyone must be on board in the fight against data disasters. Otherwise, your defence strategy will always have flaws. That is why leadership buy-in is critical, as is getting everyone in the firm on board, from the CEO to the entry-level staff. To completely safeguard your firm, you’ll require cross-functional collaboration from everyone.
Then, in order to suss out any potential weaknesses, you must thoroughly examine each of your company’s systems, apps, and data sets, as well as how they’re physically accessed. Then you should figure out which systems are absolutely necessary for the smooth operation of your company and the delivery of goods and services to your clients.
These are the functions that will need to stay up and running, even after a data disaster.
Step 2: Create Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
It’s time to create your disaster recovery plan once you’ve gotten everyone on board and have a good grasp of your equipment and assets (as well as their risks). To do so, examine your budget, resources, tools, and collaborators in this attempt. You’ll have a decent notion of how to proceed once you know how long it will take your company to come back online and how much it will cost.
Step 3: Test Your Strategy
No good strategy is complete until it has been tested to determine if it will work. Put your disaster recovery strategy to the test to see how quickly your team responds to the crisis and if any changes need to be made. Then, when a real data disaster occurs, your company will know exactly how to shut it down and resume normal operations.
While the processes themselves aren’t difficult to comprehend, preparing your company to deal with data disasters requires a significant amount of effort. Finally, if it means securing your data, the effort is worthwhile. To summarise, these are the four primary action actions you must do while creating a disaster recovery plan.
- 1. Get executive buy-in for creating a disaster recovery plan.
- 2. Analyze and evaluate your business's systems, applications and data to understand how they could be impacted.
- 3. Find out which systems you need to keep running and prioritize them during the fallout of the data disaster.
- 4. Test your plan before you actually need to put it in action.
