A Disaster Recovery Plan, sometimes referred to as a Business Continuity Plan, is a process and set of procedures put in place to protect and ultimately recover your business in the event of a disaster.
Backups are good practice for any business but a backup is just the raw files, so while this is great if you just need to restore a couple of misplaced files, what would happen if you also need to restore the entire system?
A Disaster Recovery Plan is much more than just having dusty backups of your data stacked up in the storeroom. It is a complete plan that outlines what the financial impact of a disaster will be on your business and provides a process to bring your systems back online in the most efficient way, having the least impact on your bottom line. Data recovery is sometimes confused with a Disaster Recovery Plan, but while data recovery may be able to save some files, they can’t put all your processes back in working order.
All businesses, large and small, create and manage vast amounts of data. This data is essential to the operation of your business and if lost, can shut down your business for long amounts of time.
Data can be lost in many different ways; natural or man-made disasters, virus or hacking, hardware failure or simply human error.
A Disaster Recovery Plan will give you an understanding of what really happens if the lights go out and provide a sense of security for everyone in the business and your clients.
It also includes plans to shorten delays in getting the business back on its feet, guarantee the reliability of backup systems and reduce legal liabilities if a client’s data is lost or stolen.
Prioritise what’s critical to your business and what the impact will be on the business should these systems fail. This will include compiling a complete list of hardware, software and data.