Disaster recovery features have become a vital aspect for small to medium businesses. With systems and networks becoming more complex, there are many things that can go wrong. It’s for this reason that a business needs to have a DRP, or Disaster Recovery Plan. These plans are a good way of protecting your business from unforeseen calamities that could disrupt your business process.
When creating a disaster recovery plan for your business, there are certain key elements that you need to consider.
Basics Of A Disaster Recovery Plan
In building an effective disaster recovery plan, you should include thorough documentation that lays out the details of the ins and outs of the plan. You need to know that there is no right type of DRP, nor is there a single template that fits all. But there are three basic aspects to a disaster recovery plan: Preventive measures, detective measures, and corrective measures.
In addition, before building your disaster recovery plan, make sure that it can provide an answer to these basic questions:
- What is the objective and the purpose of making one?
- Who are the assigned team responsible when certain events occur?
- What is the framework and the procedure to be followed?
Plan For The Worst Case Scenario
Since you’re planning for an unforeseen event, you might as well make sure that you have plan for the worst case scenario. That way, you’ll never be overwhelmed and you’re as prepared as you can be for any situation.
Having different tiers of backup plans is also advisable. It gives you a better assurance that when bad comes to worst, you have a system in place to make sure that these disasters are handled correctly, regardless of the disaster’s severity.
Data Issues
One of the objectives of disaster recovery plan is to protect the collection of data. Almost half of the total population of business organizations experiences data loss from both physical and virtual environments. This is often due to corruption of the file system, broken internal virtual disks, and hardware failures. Thus, there is a real need for established data recovery plans such as backup features offered by many IT solution vendors.
Test-Drive
Before deploying your disaster recovery plan, you need to have a sort of a test-drive to check if it works. Aside from making it work, you also need to know if it’s going to be effective. Through testing, any shortcomings can be identified and will garner corresponding resolutions to improve on your plan. Although the real score of its effectiveness can only be identified once a disaster occurs, at least you will have an idea of how your business and the recovery plan can operate during a disaster.
Building an effective disaster recovery plan is a must for your business. This might not directly lead to a positive impact on productivity but it will surely save you in the events that can possibly crush your business. Anticipating and adjusting for the things that might happen is one of the keys to a company’s success.
Setting up an effective DRP can be quite an intricate process since there are several elements that you need to consider. Should you want to learn more, give us a call and we’ll have our associates help you develop and test a plan that works best for your business.
Published on 7th January 2014 by Jeanne DeWitt.
