How to Create a Business Disaster Recovery Plan

One of the worst things that can happen to your business is having strike and not having a disaster recovery plan. Yes disasters are unfortunate, but without an immediately implementable disaster recovery plan your business is going to suffer much more than if it otherwise would have.

The impact on your business if you are not able to keep critical systems up after a disaster are momentous. It's like if you were sleeping soundly in your home and suddenly you had no walls or roof or foundation; what would you do? Your home would begin to crumble around you and you'd have to begin to rebuild right away or you and your family would be living in the car! This is why homeowners and even renters have insurance against this type of event. Why then wouldn't your business have a disaster recovery plan in place?

Continuity: Maybe the biggest component to your business disaster recovery plan is how you are going to continue to conduct your business in the event of a disaster? Do you have your information regularly backed up on external servers? Do you have physical copies of your most critical information kept somewhere safe and off-site? How long would it take you to get these things in place? Business continuity is a critical element in your disaster recovery plan; without it your clients, your partners and your livelihood would go elsewhere.

Customer Impact: Doubly troubling about the business continuity portion of this situation is that if you can't do your part to keep your customers' business going, there may be verbiage written into your contracts about breach which you then could be responsible for.

Restoration: Once you have looked at the continuity portion of your business disaster recovery plan you should figure out how to restore the information that was lost. If this isn't done seamlessly you may be in violation of contracts. At the very least your customers may simply migrate away from you; for them and the world, life and business move on.

Business Impact: You should also have an idea of the business impact. Conducting hypothetical business impact analyses can help you see how a disaster would impact you and what your team could do!