If your IT systems went down today, would your business cope? If your answer was yes, for how long?
For many organisations, the reliance on IT systems is so extensive that they would quickly be unable to operate without. A robust disaster recovery plan is key in returning to business as usual and averting potentially catastrophic business impact. No matter how big or small your organisation is, having a plan in place is essential. Here are a few tips on how to create a disaster recovery plan for your business.
Understand your risks
What factors pose the most risks to your current IT infrastructure? Think about all the possible risks involved; staff errors, system and power failures, possible flood and fire. A broad spectrum of “what if” scenarios should be accounted for. This will help to develop appropriate plans in each event. For example, do you have an area considered high-risk for flooding? Then an off-site or elevated floor positioning would be best.
Prioritise and set recovery point and time objectives
In your disaster recovery plan, prioritise the order of services to get back up and running. Set priorities according to which is most important to the operation of your business. In each of these steps, set achievable recovery time objectives (RTOs). What is the maximum amount of downtime that can be tolerated? This should be for the shortest amount of time as possible. But look at it pragmatically.
Evaluate your recovery point objective (RPO), how recent the data should be once recovered. This will help to decide how frequently you need to backup or otherwise protect your data.
RPO’s in the low seconds (or zero) are possible with technology, as are low RTO’s. There is a progressively sliding scale in terms of investment requirement.
Consider your cloud providers / services
Many organisations believe that once their data is “in the cloud” it is protected from all manner of potential disaster scenarios. While this is often the case with some types of cloud service (such as Software as a Service), as a business you should have a clear understanding of the measures taken by your service provider.
Assumptions will not cut it if the provider happened to have a major disruption and they didn’t have a sufficient mechanism in place to protect. Remove those assumptions by checking and supplementing with additional measures if required.
Create a step-by-step written document / “runbook”:
It is easy to get into a panic when something goes wrong. Avoid delays by invoking the pre-written disaster recovery plan. A step-by-step written runbook in terms that relevant individuals understand will help the recovery team know what their duties are should the need arise.
Consider where you store your runbook. Having the runbook saved in a cloud platform or shared storage area that is unavailable won’t help you recover. Ideally, store your recovery documentation in multiple locations / forms to ensure you mitigate this risk.
Test, test, test!
Test your disaster recovery plan in its entirety – and regularly. This ensures that it is still relevant to business requirements and able to get the business back up and running in a timely manner. The plan is something to be maintained, not created then forgotten about. So test it regularly and keep it up to date! This will also allow for team members to become familiar with the process.
Still unsure on how to approach disaster recovery? Have a plan you aren’t confident in or know your plans are likely insufficient? Get in touch with the experts at TechAlign:
- to understand your organisation, its operations, risks and more before creating a disaster recovery strategy that best suits you.
- we remove the jargon, so that your senior stakeholders, managers and operational team members understand the process.
- we have extensive experience assisting clients getting a handle on disaster recovery and developing plans that are sensibly crafted for their organisation.
Get in touch with us today for a no-obligation chat on how we can work together to safeguarding your businesses IT services.