What Steps Make Up a Data Backup Disaster Recovery Plan?

When disaster strikes, it’s important that businesses have a data backup disaster recovery plan in place so everyone is on the same page as to recovery steps and critical business data can be recovered, jumpstarting operations as quickly as possible.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is an organization-wide, documented strategy for a business to quickly resume operations after a disaster (outage, breach, or another unplanned incident). It’s an essential part of a layered approach to data security and cybersecurity as a whole.

Disaster recovery plans are crucial for businesses for many reasons, including:

• Reducing costly downtime: Downtime is expensive, especially for small to mid-sized businesses that can’t afford huge expenditures as a result of an outage or cyberattack. Unfortunately, downtime can cost businesses around $20,000 per hour.

• Recovering business-critical data: Without access to certain data, business operations can be severely hampered if not halted entirely. After a disaster, it’s important that critical business data is recovered and available for use again as quickly as possible.

• Reducing the risk of future data loss and reputational harm: Having a disaster recovery plan is important because not only does it make it easier to recover data to get your business up and running again quickly, but it also strengthens your security posture which helps protect against attacks and data loss in the future. Avoiding attacks prevents data access issues and the reputational harm that stems from cyberattacks on businesses.

Steps in a Data Backup Disaster Recovery Plan

To build an effective recovery plan, businesses need to consider many different things that make their business tick. From data backups to core infrastructure, everything must be accounted for and understood in order for it to be set back in action post-incident. Every scenario must be thought of and planned for and every piece of equipment and software must be accounted for and planned for.

For cybersecurity, a recovery plan involves a lot of reaction planning: who needs to be notified? Do employees know the appropriate next steps for reporting an incident?

Many things need to be considered, documented, and established as a part of this process, including developing a list of potential risk and vulnerabilities (and steps to recover if they’re attacked), a running inventory of critical systems and physical assets, and a communication plan that identifies how incidents need to be reported, who should be notified, how this communication will happen, and what next steps are for everyone involved.

Another major aspect of disaster recovery is reconnecting access to your most important business data and recovering the data that’s critical to business operations. This is done in a few ways:

1. Determine Critical Infrastructure: Establish your most critical infrastructure that must be restored ASAP in order to keep business operations from being impacted.
2. Set Recovery Timeline: How long can you go without your data? This is a question you must ask to set a recovery timeline that establishes how much data loss and time can go by before business operations are negatively affected.

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3. Assign Roles and Responsibilities: Everyone needs to understand their role in a proper recovery plan. Who does what, when, and how, so that recovery can commence as soon as possible.
4. Consistent Data Backups: Though this takes place before an unplanned incident, it’s still a crucial part of a recovery plan because backing up your data makes it possible to recover missing or stolen information and to use it to quickly re-establish business operations. How often you back up data is up to individual businesses.

In Conclusion

Is your business prepared for cyberattacks, outages, disasters, and other unplanned incidents that can throw a wrench into your operations? With a data backup and disaster recovery plan, you can prepare your technology, equipment, and people so that recovery is fast and effective to mitigate the risks associated with prolonged downtime.

What are the best practices for backing up data and recovering from a disaster? Learn more about what's included in a disaster recovery plan and how it helps businesses avoid the risks of downtime, data loss, and halts in business operations.