Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan

As businesses rely more heavily on information technology, the potential damage caused by an IT disaster to a business’s success increases dramatically. Your ability to save your business in the event of a severe hardware malfunction depends a great deal on whether you have a Disaster Recovery plan ready and staff that is ready to implement it.

Preparing for Disaster Recovery

The first step in creating your Disaster Recovery plan is to recognize potential problems, based on the hardware you are using, the way your hardware is being used by your employees, and the location of your hardware. You need to plan for all types of potential problems including:

• Purposeful damage by disgruntled employees.
• Theft (physical) and data theft (hacking).
• Environmental issues related to your geographical area.
• Age and reliability of hardware.
• The adding and deletion of technology and editing of sensitive server files.

You should go over with your staff how these potential problems could occur, how they can be prevented, but also the worst case scenarios based on the severity of these potential disasters. This will help your business prepare for Disaster Recovery, should it need to occur, as well as understand what may go wrong so it can more easily be found and addressed.

Developing Your Plan

Once you have gone over the potential problems that can occur with your data it is time to develop a plan for Disaster Recovery that your staff will be ready to implement. Your staff should be well versed in what to do in the event you lose your data, with each employee knowing their exact role in order to make the process smooth and simple.

Your first step should be to have a set budget for Disaster Recovery. Time spent fixing problems is time not working, and several pieces of hardware may need to be immediately replaced (i.e. Network Storage Server). All of these can be fairly extensive costs to your company if it has not been properly budgeted. It may also be a good idea to purchase insurance on your hardware that you can use to easily replace the pieces that are missing/damaged.

The next step is to draft the Disaster Recovery plan. For obvious reasons, the plan should be printed on paper with multiple copies available and the name of the individual who is supposed to perform a specific action clearly outlined. Each step should be carefully described and written in clear language.

Once you have written out your Disaster Recovery plan, you should practice it – especially when there is turnover within your company. Once you have created, practiced, and prepared for Disaster Recovery, the process should be much easier.