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1. Natural Disasters

Mother Nature can be cruel. Storms, fires, and floods can all do irreparable damage to your business. Without a disaster recovery plan in place, you may find it extremely difficult to resume operations, putting the future of your company in jeopardy. 80% of companies that close for more than 5 days never reopen, so getting back on your feet is crucial in the event of a natural disaster.

2. Hardware Failure

Whether from a power surge or other cause, if your hardware fails it can take all your data with it. While you can take steps to protect your hardware with cooling systems, power surge protectors, and other technology, it is essential to regularly back-up your data. Using a cloud-based or off-site storage can add additional protections, as it is unlikely both locations will be struck at the same time. Your disaster recovery plan should include these steps, to ward off the potential data loss that could occur.

3. Human Errors

No one is perfect, and that includes you and your employees. Forgetting to save changes, accidentally deleting an important document, or flipping the wrong switch could lead to a significant loss for your company. Training programs can help reduce errors, but the only way to keep your business truly safe from a data loss due to human error is to back-up data regularly.

See also: Data Backup vs Business Continuity - What's the difference?

4. Cyber Crimes

Unfortunately, cyber crimes are on the rise and most businesses are affected at some point. A virus or ransomware attack could hold your data hostage, grinding your business to a halt and causing massive profit losses. Your disaster recovery plan should include steps to recover from a hacking attempt, keeping your data safe and accessible.

5. Customer Service

Ultimately, you need a disaster recover y plan to provide your customers the service they have come to expect from you. If your business must shut down, or has a prolonged service interruption, you could lose valuable customers to a competitor. The faster you can get back on your feet, the happier your clients will be.

Basic Steps to Creating Your IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Building adisaster recovery plan is not as simple as writing a document. You need to do careful research to understand the needs of your organization and the risks it faces. You also need to carefully coordinate the plan with all stakeholders, test it to make sure it works, and continuously update it to make sure it stays relevant.

Follow these steps to create a working disaster recovery plan:

Map out your assets - identify what you need to protect, including network equipment, hardware, software, cloud services, and most important, your critical data. For each item note its physical or virtual location, relation to other assets, vendor and version, networking parameters, etc.

Identify criticality and context - understand how your assets are used and their importance to the business. Classify assets into high impact, medium impact and low impact, by identifying how likely they are to disrupt business operations.

Risk assessment - identify which threats are likely to face the business as a whole and specific assets. Interview the staff who work on critical systems and ask them what are the most likely causes of service interruption.

Define recovery objectives - consult with senior management and operations staff to understand what would be the impact of interruption to each critical system for one minute, one hour, one day, or more. Use this information to define your RTO and RPO.

Select disaster recovery setup and tooling - using your knowledge of assets to be protected, risks and required RTO/RPO, envision your final disaster recovery setup. Will you have a hot DR site? Where will it be located, and will it be cloud-based or self-hosted? Which backups or replicas will you maintain? Where will they be located? Select the software or hardware, cloud services or partners that can help you achieve the required setup.

Budgeting - as important as disaster recovery is to your business, you will have a limited budget. Present several options to management, each with a progressively higher price tag but better RTO/RPO and/or support for more critical services. Allow them to decide on the right balance between risk and investment in DR technology.

Approval - put together an agreed draft of your DR plan based on feedbacks from management and get final sign off on the plan.

Communicate the plan - circulate your document to the disaster recovery team, to senior management, and to anyone else who will be involved with or affected by DR procedures.

Test and review - test the plan by conducting a realistic disaster drill, and seeing if and how staff act according to the plan. Learn from the test and modify the plan and procedures accordingly. You should periodically review the plan - at least every six months - to ensure it is still relevant and reflects the current organizational structure and IT setup.