What is disaster recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan (DRP), is a set of documented policies and procedures designed to aid businesses in carrying out recovery procedures in the case of a loss. When a disaster occurs, a company’s services must be quickly restored and kept running, therefore disaster recovery is a vital component of the continuity system’s operations.
Importance of having a disaster recovery plan
With millions of dollars at stake and possible closure if operations are interrupted, businesses are becoming more tolerant of downtime than ever before. This is the main factor of increased investments on business continuity by many companies.
Research firm Gartner found that 70% of companies that had a 96-hour shutdown never recovered. A disaster recovery plan assures that your company’s infrastructure, including its applications, will continue to be accessible at all times, even in the worst scenario. As well, a disaster recovery plan can help your business look more reliable because you can assure your customers that your services will keep running. Which will give you an edge over your competitors.
How does a strategy for disaster recovery function?
The first actions of the response team after a disaster should focus on doing a rapid evaluation of the situation to determine what hardware, software, data, or systems were harmed and, in turn, which stage of the recovery plan has to be implemented.
Once the emergency has passed, it’s time to take another look at how well the plan was implemented to assess its weaknesses and strengths and determine where it may be strengthened or updated.
The disaster recovery plan should be evaluated and updated on a regular basis, even when there is no immediate need to do so. Plan expiration is possible if changes aren’t made often enough in response to the changing nature of both threats and businesses.
What elements should be included into a strategy for disaster recovery?
Objective
During or after a disaster, the organization’s objectives, such as the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO), will be set out in a statement of objectives.
How much data the organization is prepared to lose in the event of a disaster is referred to as the recovery point aim. If you want to ensure that you never lose more than an hour’s worth of data, for instance, you’ll need to back it up at least every an hour.
Team
Disaster recovery plan should contain a description of the persons who are accountable for the plan’s implementation and include backup plans in the event that certain employees are unable to perform their duties.
IT inventory
An up-to-date IT inventory should include information on all hardware, software, and cloud services utilized by the company, as well as their ownership status, lease terms, and business criticality.
Backup policy
The DRP should detail where, on what devices, and in what folders the team backs up its various data resources, as well as how it should restore those resources from backup.
Disaster recovery Procedures
All emergency measures, such as last-minute backups, mitigation processes, damage control, and removal of cybersecurity threats, should be spelled out in full in these separate protocols.
Disaster retrieval area
One of the key components of any good disaster recovery strategy is the identification of a strong disaster recovery location. All data may be backed up or duplicated in a hot disaster recovery site, a distant data center with all important systems. This will allow for a smooth transition to the hot site in the case of a disaster.
Restoration plan
And last, it’s important to stick to best practices and make sure your disaster recovery plan has thorough instructions for resuming normal operations after a major disaster. That is to say, even if you begin with a disaster recovery plan template, you should include every detail necessary to get each component of the organization back online. Following are some processes to think about at each stage.
