Disaster recovery

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) refers to an organisation’s ability to successfully plan for and recover from an event that disrupts the business and its day-to-day operations. These events include cyber attacks, power outages, natural disasters, and pandemics like COVID-19. The aim of a DR plan is to be able to restore systems and IT infrastructure as quickly as possible, minimizing downtime and mitigating impacts on business continuity.

Why is Disaster Recovery important?

Disasters can cause varying levels of damage, with economic repercussions often being the most critical – particularly for small or start-up businesses. DR can be notoriously expensive: IBM estimated that the average cost of a data breach in 2020 was $3.86 million (£3.61 million), and the Uptime Institute’s 2021 report stated that 40% of outages that year cost businesses between $100,000 (£82,000) and $1 million (£820,000). Moreover, failure to implement a thorough DR plan can result in noncompliance with government and legal regulations, which can also have a monetary cost. For these reasons, a sound DR plan is essential for any business.

7 Steps to Create a Solid Disaster Recovery Plan:

1. Assemble a Disaster Recovery Team

This is the team of people who will take the lead on recovering data in case of a disaster. When choosing who to include on the team, think carefully about each individual’s strengths. You should have specialists in the following:

• Crisis management – Co-ordinates the plan, resolves delays, and oversees recovery.

• Business continuity – Aligns recovery priorities with business objectives; i.e., ensuring that the data recovery plan prioritises assets that are most critical to the business.

• Impact assessment and recovery – they should have technical expertise in IT infrastructure and service restoration.

• Executive management – Ensures top-level oversight and decision-making.

• Critical Business Unit Representatives – Addresses the needs of individual departments.

2. Evaluate Risks & Critical Assets.

Identify assets such as servers, websites and applications, customer information, databases, paper or electronic documents, and key personnel.

Assess potential risks (e.g., natural disasters, system failure, accidental error or malicious activities) and develop mitigation strategies tailored to each eventuality.

3. Establish Backup Solutions

Determine where data will be stored or backed up during emergencies – off-site facilities, cloud storage, or third-party applications available to businesses, like. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) or Backup as a Service (BaaS).

4. Define Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Set the maximum acceptable time for downtime to mitigate excessive data loss. Data loss is a big concern when it comes to disaster recovery, so it is essential that the RPO can be effectively achieved.

5. Set Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

This is the maximum acceptable time that a business can be offline following a disaster, and after this time has passed, the business should be able to resume normal operations. This, like RPO, encourages careful planning and analysis when making a disaster recovery plan to ensure that these objectives can be reasonably met.

6. Ensure Compliance with Regulations

Verify that your DR plan complies with sector-specific regulations to avoid penalties and maintain legal standing.

7. Test & Review Regularly

To ensure that DR plans will still be effective despite any changes to a business, it is critical that plans and applications are tested and reviewed on every level on a regular basis. Assign members of your DR team to oversee and implement this.

Disaster Recovery is a critical component of any organisation’s risk management strategy, ensuring resilience against disruptions that can jeopardise operations and financial stability.

Our Experts at iTech Knowhow can help you assemble a skilled team, identify risks and establish clear recovery objectives.

A well-structured DR plan not only safeguards essential assets but also demonstrates a commitment to operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and long-term success.