8 Steps to Create A Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business

Having a strong IT infrastructure for your business is a humongous task. If you have already built one, you should be more than happy. But this is just half the work done because you need to ensure that it is secure enough. Additionally, you should have a disaster recovery plan in place because you can never predict when disasters such as a fire, hurricane or a cyber-attack may strike.

Such disasters can render your business inoperable and may even finish it for good unless you are capable of dealing with them. Therefore, you must absolutely have a clear plan to enable recovery for your business when a catastrophe strikes. Here are some steps that you need to take for creating and implementing a disaster recovery plan.

Identify critical assets for your business

The first and perhaps the most important step is to identify the critical assets of your business. These could be physical assets such as the plant, infrastructure, and machinery or virtual assets like your business data. Further, your key employees also come under the category of critical assets. These are the assets that you need to access on a daily basis to operate your business smoothly. Once you prioritize assets on the basis of their criticality, you can include their safekeeping in your disaster recovery plan.

List the possible disasters

If you want to create a disaster recovery plan for your business, you should know what the dangers are. What kinds of disasters are most likely to occur? Is your business located in a geographical disaster-prone area? Is there political unrest or terrorism in your part of the world? Are you at a high risk of data leakage or theft? Fighting a hidden enemy makes the battle challenge. Knowing your enemy, on the other hand, is the most important aspect of creating a plan to protect yourself from it. Therefore, it becomes mandatory to identify your threats and risks in the first place. Only then can you create a plan that covers you against the disasters that are most likely to take place.

Have an emergency response plan

Another vital aspect of a disaster recovery strategy is to have a proper emergency response plan. As the name suggests, it refers to the first movie you would make when the disaster strikes. As a business owner, you need to educate your employees to stay safe and protect the organization’s assets in the face of a disaster. You should establish a protocol, assign responsibilities to the employees and hold periodic training sessions for them. The purpose is to prepare them to handle the toughest situations with the right approach and a good presence of mind.

Create a business continuity plan

Besides having an emergency response plan, you also need to create a business continuity plan as a part of the disaster recovery strategy. After all, you would not want your business to come to a standstill even if the worse happens. Primarily, this strategy focuses on resuming the operations as soon as possible after a disaster strikes. A business continuity plan includes business impact analysis, which defines the effects that a disaster can have on your business. Further, it also covers the identification of recovery strategies, development of a framework for the plan and regular testing to make sure that it is good enough.

Duplicate and backup data and records

Data is the most significant asset for any business and you cannot risk losing it, no matter how big a disaster is. Ideally, you should have updated duplicates of the entire key data including records, documents, and contracts. It is best to hire professional IT services for your business to take the backups and maintain them safely off-site or in the cloud. Backups protect your business data against natural disasters, hardware failure, and cyber attacks. No matter what the concerns may be, they keep you covered.

Compile important contact information

Besides taking data backups and maintaining duplicates, it is equally important to compile the key contact information. These are the people you need to connect with after the disaster. Primarily, they include your major clients, lenders, realtors, management agencies, vendors, and insurance companies. Staying connected with them is vital to bringing your business back on track. Keeping records helps because you need not struggle with reaching out to people who matter, even after a disaster takes place.

Build a communication strategy

You would want to safeguard your business data and contact details so that you can maintain important connections after the disaster. But how do you communicate with these people? Building a proper communication strategy as a part of normal operations and post-disaster operations help. While creating such a strategy, try having a mix of low-tech and high-tech. When it comes to low-tech tactics, contacting clients by phone, placing notices in local newspapers and making radio announcements help. Conversely, sending newsletters and posting updates on social media are the elements of high-tech communication strategies. Make sure that you have a clear communication protocol that your employees follow in all circumstances.

Review your insurance coverage

Getting an insurance cover is essential for businesses. However, you cannot expect every kind of insurance to be helpful in the event of the disaster. Review the current insurance policy to verify whether there are gaps in the coverage. For instance, you would require adequate coverage to pay for physical damages caused by the disaster in addition to the indirect costs related to business disruption. The best approach would be to get additional coverage for the disasters that your business is prone to. Obviously, it is wise to take a flood or earthquake insurance if you are in a geographically-prone area. A disaster recovery plan is something than no business can manage without. It keeps you covered against the worst disasters and make sure that your business is never out of operation. The aim of the plan is to get you up and running within no time and without any major disruptions. Not having one, on the other hand, can spell doom for your business.