What Measures Are Included in a Disaster Recovery Plan?

What are the measures included in a disaster recovery plan and how should your business respond after an outage, disruption, or cyberattack that leaves you unable to access data or do business?

Learn more about disaster recovery plans, how they help you backup your business, and their role within your cybersecurity strategy.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a business’ way of recovering crucial data that is lost during a data breach.

A modern recovery plan utilizes cloud storage to securely and conveniently store your data so it’s always available in the event of a disaster.

Disaster recovery is an important piece of a larger cybersecurity plan and plays a key role in protecting your business by never having to worry about losing key data, even when worse comes to worse.

Why is Disaster Recovery Important for a Modern SMB?

Disaster recovery is especially important for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) who are not only more susceptible to cyberattacks that are becoming more and more frequent, but who are more likely to be severely harmed by the potential downtime and data loss presented by these attacks because they often lack the ability to adequately defend themselves.

For SMBs, a cyberattack is a question of when, not if. With 71% of SMBs unprepared for an attack, getting ahead of cyber criminals is crucial.

In fact, downtime for an SMB can be fatal to the company. 93% of companies without a disaster recovery plan who suffer a major data disaster are out of business within a year.

Downtime is also one of the costliest things an SMB can deal with, costing between $20,000 and $50,000 per hour.

Additionally, the damage to your reputation can be just as harmful. Information security is important for companies, but it’s also an important consideration for their customers with 70% of consumers saying they’d stop doing business with a company who experienced a data breach.

Without a proper disaster recovery plan in place, an SMB is at risk of long downtime, data loss, financial loss, reputational harm, and possibly complete closure.

What Are the Measures Included in a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is more than just downloading backup files, it’s a fully-fledged strategy that requires risk analysis, strategic planning, cybersecurity expertise, and these additional measures:

Protecting Critical Infrastructure

One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery plan is to document your most essential infrastructure and information in order to develop recovery steps that get your business operating again as quickly as possible and limit the possibility of extended downtime.

Understanding Risks

Knowing your largest potential risks helps you understand how to build a disaster recovery plan that’s made specifically for your business.

If you don’t understand where your weaknesses and risks lie, there’s no way to have an effective recovery plan in place.

Ask yourself questions about how you use your data. For example: are you reliant on constant access to certain databases?

If so, then a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack could be extremely harmful to your business.

A DDoS attack limits access to your database through a bombardment of illegitimate requests, making it impossible for legitimate data to get through.

This type of knowledge helps us derive your strategy to include the necessary features to help cover for risks like the one above.

Knowing your largest risks allows our team to make sure that they’re covered in a disaster recovery plan.

Strategy for Communication

Often overlooked, a communications strategy is a vital part of a disaster recovery plan.

A process must be laid out for internal and external communication in the event of a data disaster so that all key players are aware and informed on the situation.

Who needs to be notified? Who will be affected? What are the next steps?

Have a multi-channel notification system in place and a crisis communications team identified to make sure that the people who need to know are informed and the correct teams can begin to take action toward recovery.

Data Recovery Plan

The core of your disaster recovery plan is the plan you have in place to recover your data and information.

One of the most important aspects of data recovery is establishing and understanding your business’ Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

• RPO represents your business’ maximum tolerable data loss during an outage measured in downtime. This answers the question “How long can you go without updated information before it severely impacts your business?” For example: If a business’ RPO is four hours, then it can survive fours of data loss before it’s considered an unacceptable amount.
• RTO is the maximum duration of time in which business data and processes can be down after a failure.

Both numbers help you lay out an appropriate recovery timeline that ensures the business is not severely interrupted and your data losses are tolerable.

Periodic Review

The final measure in a disaster recovery plan is continued management and periodic reviews.

With changes in technology and your company over time, it’s important that a plan is consistently tested and updated to ensure it still fits your needs.

As your business grows and new variables are introduced, your disaster recovery plan needs to adapt for it to continue to be sufficient in the event of a disaster.

Using an MSSP for Disaster Recovery Strategy

Developing a disaster recovery plan involves considering many complex aspects of data recovery and that can be too much to ask for SMBs on a strict budget and who don’t already have large cybersecurity teams.

Choosing to work with a managed security services partner (MSSP) alleviates much of this because MSSPs have access to tools and expertise that are beyond the scope of a typical business.

With an MSSP, a team of experts act as your cybersecurity branch, complete with engineers, developers, vCISOs, and analysts.

An MSSP has the resources to help you build a disaster recovery strategy that hits all the points mentioned above and which ensures that your business is protected even after disaster strikes.

Conclusion

To help you make sure your most crucial data and business processes are quickly and properly recovered after a disruption, it’s important that you work alongside experts to develop an effective disaster recovery strategy that includes:

• Protecting your most critical infrastructure
• Recognizing your risks
• Establishing a communications plan
• A plan for recovering data and achieving your RTO and RPO
• Periodically reviewing and revising your plan to stay up to date

If you feel that you need help putting all of this to practice, contact DOT Security today to enlist the help of our experts and see firsthand the power of working alongside an experienced MSSP.

DOT Security is a cybersecurity provider that operates from a fully US-based Security Operations Center, offering comprehensive business security through best-in-class solutions. To learn more about what DOT Security can do for you, get in touch.