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What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? Importance, Types, Components & Benefits

BY Spanning Cloud Apps

Backup Cybersecurity disaster recovery

Data disasters and business downtime due to cyberthreats, employee mistakes, technical glitches or natural disasters can be catastrophic for your business. Without a disaster recovery plan (DRP), such events can potentially put you out of business for good.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50% of businesses fail to reopen following a disaster . Unfortunately, disasters often strike without warning. That’s why preparation is key to quickly recovering from any event that may result in data loss or interrupt business functions.

In this article, we will delve deeper into the importance of a disaster recovery plan, different types of DRPs and their benefits, and how to reinforce your organization’s disaster recovery plan.

What is a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is a documented strategy including policies, procedures and responsibilities to help organizations recover their IT systems and data in the aftermath of a disaster. It contains detailed guidelines on how an organization should respond to disruptive events, such as cyberattacks, power outages, application failure or human error. A DRP is a critical component of a business continuity plan. It enables organizations to recover from unplanned incidents effectively and resume business operations as quickly as possible.

What is the purpose of a disaster recovery plan?

The main goal of a disaster recovery plan is to minimize business disruption following a disaster, cyber incident or data loss event. Disaster recovery planning is critical to responding to unforeseen catastrophic incidents effectively and mitigating the effects on business. A well-established disaster recovery plan reduces recovery times, minimizes data loss and downtime, and ensures rapid recovery. It allows businesses to resume operations swiftly with minimal or no disruption after an unexpected event.

Why is it important to have a disaster recovery plan?

Whether natural or man-made, disasters can wreak havoc on businesses, resulting in data loss, damaged IT infrastructure and operational standstills. A disaster recovery plan outlines steps to minimize disruptions and expedite recovery after a disaster strikes. A robust DRP ensures business continuity by establishing clear steps to restore critical systems, applications and data. It helps organizations maintain essential functions during and after a crisis.

A well-structured disaster recovery plan also enhances resilience. It allows businesses to adapt to unexpected situations effectively, mitigating the impact and accelerating recovery. Additionally, compliance requirements often mandate the implementation of a disaster recovery plan in many industries. Adhering to these regulations not only avoids penalties but also demonstrates your commitment to operational reliability and customer service.

An icon with a server on fire and a recovery symbol to represent disaster recovery.

How does disaster recovery planning differ from business continuity planning?

While closely related, a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan (BCP) are two distinct strategies aimed at mitigating risks during unforeseen events and serve different purposes.

A disaster recovery plan focuses on the restoration of IT infrastructure and data following a disruptive incident. It outlines specific steps and procedures to recover critical systems, applications and data to minimize downtime and ensure operational continuity.

On the other hand, a business continuity plan encompasses a broader scope beyond IT. It contains plans for personnel, facilities, communications and business processes to maintain essential operations during and after a disaster. Business continuity planning includes DRP as a subset but also covers other aspects, such as employee safety, crisis communication and resource management.

Incident response plan vs. disaster recovery plan

An incident response plan (IRP) concentrates on immediate actions that must be taken when a security breach, cyberattack or any incident occurs. The main objective of an IRP is to reduce recovery times and costs associated with an IT incident. It outlines protocols for identifying, containing, mitigating and eradicating the incident rapidly. Incident response planning aims to minimize the damage caused by an incident, preserve evidence for analysis and facilitate the organization’s return to normal operations.

A disaster recovery plan primarily focuses on restoring and recovering critical IT systems, applications and data after a catastrophic event. It outlines specific steps to minimize downtime, restore operations and ensure data integrity.

What are some different types of disaster recovery plans?

There are different types of disaster recovery plans to ensure your business can recover effectively in the face of disasters. Each of these plans plays a crucial role in safeguarding different aspects of your organization’s IT infrastructure and caters to specific organizational needs. Selecting a specific plan or combining different plans depends on the nature of your business, the criticality of systems, budget considerations and regulatory requirements.

Network disaster recovery plan

A network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) focuses on restoring network infrastructure and connectivity after a disruptive event, such as a natural disaster, cyberattack or technical failure. It includes strategies and procedures for identifying vulnerabilities, backing up configurations, reconfiguring network infrastructure and establishing alternative communication channels to maintain connectivity.

Data center disaster recovery plan

A data center disaster recovery plan (DCDRP) is a crucial strategy that outlines procedures for recovering servers, storage systems and infrastructure components housed within a data center facility. It involves assessing vulnerabilities, defining recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) , establishing failover mechanisms and maintaining off-site backups for data redundancy. Data centers play a vital role in storing, processing and managing your organization’s critical information; therefore, a comprehensive data center disaster recovery plan is paramount.

Cloud disaster recovery plan

Cloud disaster recovery plans leverage cloud services for data storage, backup and recovery. Organizations store critical data and replicate systems in the cloud to ensure redundancy and availability. The flexibility and scalability of cloud solutions enable rapid recovery and accessibility from anywhere with an internet connection. Additionally, cloud disaster recovery plans often include automated backup processes, reducing the need for manual intervention.

Virtualized disaster recovery plan

A virtual disaster recovery plan involves replicating workloads to a virtual environment for quick recovery and seamless business continuity in the face of an IT disaster. Disaster recovery with virtualized workloads is easier, quicker and more cost-effective than with a physical setup.

Disaster Recovery-as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is a subscription-based model offering disaster recovery capabilities hosted and managed by a third-party provider. It provides a comprehensive solution, including hardware, software and expertise, to facilitate rapid recovery in case of a disaster. DRaaS often integrates with cloud services, providing flexible and cost-effective recovery options. It allows organizations to outsource the complexity of disaster recovery planning and implementation, ensuring expert management of critical systems and data.  

What should be included in a disaster recovery plan?

A comprehensive disaster recovery plan serves as a critical roadmap for organizations to navigate through crises and minimize disruptions. An effective DRP should include several key components to respond to various disaster scenarios swiftly and efficiently:  

  • IT inventory: Creating an inventory of IT assets will provide a clear understanding of critical systems, applications, hardware and data that are essential for business operations.
  • Roles and responsibilities: Define roles and responsibilities for each team member involved in the recovery process. Establishing a clear chain of command and outlining specific duties during a crisis helps streamline actions and decision-making.
  • Goals and objectives: Establishing clear goals and objectives aligns the recovery process with the broader business strategy and ensures a focused approach. Define what your RTO/RPO goals are and set benchmarks for recovery performance, outlining acceptable downtime and service restoration expectations.
  • Backup procedures: Regular backups are fundamental to data protection and serve as a foundational element of disaster recovery. Define the frequency and methodology for data backups (incremental, differential or full) based on criticality. Specify where backups are stored, ensuring redundancy and accessibility during recovery. Implement regular checks to verify the integrity and restorability of your backups.
  • Disaster recovery procedures: Outline detailed procedures for recovering critical systems and operations, including incident response protocols and recovery workflow. Create step-by-step processes to restore systems, applications and data, considering various disaster scenarios. Establish communication channels and protocols to keep stakeholders informed during the recovery process.
  • Testing strategy: Regular testing ensures the readiness and effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan. Define how often the plan will be tested (quarterly, semi-annually or annually). Create scenarios simulating different disaster scenarios to assess the plan’s effectiveness. Document results, identify weaknesses and update the plan based on test outcomes.
  • Plan documentation: Thorough documentation ensures accessibility and clarity when executing your DR plan during stressful situations. Maintain updated versions of your disaster recovery plan, clearly labeling revisions and changes. Ensure easy access to the plan for relevant stakeholders, both in digital and hardcopy formats.  

What are the benefits of a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is a proactive strategy that offers numerous benefits to organizations of all sizes:

  • Minimized downtime: Disaster recovery planning helps minimize downtime by enabling swift recovery and reducing operational disruptions.
  • Data protection: Backups are an important element of a disaster recovery plan. Creating a copy(ies) of your data and storing it in a secure location helps safeguard critical information against loss or corruption.
  • Enhanced resilience: A DRP enhances resilience by enabling you to adapt swiftly to unexpected situations. Regularly testing and updating your DRP will help identify weaknesses and strengthen the plan, thereby improving overall resilience against potential threats.
  • Business continuity: A comprehensive DRP ensures business continuity by outlining steps and best practices to maintain essential functions during and after a disaster. It also helps minimize the impact of disasters on business operations.
  • Regulatory compliance: A robust disaster recovery plan ensures your organization’s operations and processes align with industry standards and legal requirements, assisting in regulatory compliance.
  • Reduced financial loss: Disaster recovery planning helps mitigate revenue loss and potential legal liabilities. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 , organizations with high levels of incident response planning and testing saved $1.49 million compared to those with low levels.
  • Enhanced stakeholder confidence: Having a well-structured disaster recovery plan demonstrates your organization’s preparedness and commitment to operational reliability. This helps maintain confidence among stakeholders, including customers, investors and employees, reassuring them that your organization is prepared to navigate through crises effectively.  

Support your disaster recovery plan with Spanning Backup

The harsh reality about disasters is no business is safe — they can and will strike. The most important question is, “Are you prepared?”

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What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster recovery (DR) is an organization’s ability to restore access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster event, whether natural or caused by human action (or error). DR is considered a subset of business continuity, explicitly focusing on ensuring that the IT systems that support critical business functions are operational as soon as possible after a disruptive event occurs.

Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial for any business, especially those operating either partially or entirely in the cloud. Disasters that interrupt service and cause data loss can happen anytime without warning—your network could have an outage, a critical bug could get released, or your business might have to weather a natural disaster. Organizations with robust and well-tested disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and resume core operations rapidly when things go awry.   

Learn more about Google Cloud backup and disaster recovery features and products and how they can be used to build the right DR solution for your business.

IT disaster recovery defined

IT disaster recovery is a portfolio of policies, tools, and processes used to recover or continue operations of critical IT infrastructure, software, and systems after a natural or human-made disaster.

The first and foremost aspect of a disaster recovery plan is cloud. The cloud is considered the best solution for both business continuity and disaster recovery. The cloud eliminates the need to run a separate disaster recovery data center (or recovery site). 

What is a disaster recovery site? 

It’s a second, physical data center that’s costly to build and maintain—and with the cloud, made unnecessary.

What is considered a disaster?

Dr planning and strategies focus on responding to and recovering from disasters—events that disrupt or completely stop a business from operating..

While these events can be natural disasters like a hurricane, they can also be caused by a severe system failure, an intentional attack, or even human error. 

Types of disasters can include: 

  • Natural disasters (for example, earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, or wildfires)
  • Pandemics and epidemics
  • Cyber attacks (for example, malware, DDoS, and ransomware attacks)
  • Other intentional, human-caused threats such as terrorist or biochemical attacks
  • Technological hazards (for example, power outages, pipeline explosions, and transportation accidents)
  • Machine and hardware failure 

Importance of disaster recovery

Technology plays an increasingly important role in every aspect of business, with applications and services enabling companies to be more agile, available, and connected. This trend has contributed to the widespread adoption of cloud computing by organizations to drive growth, innovation, and exceptional customer experience. 

However, the migration to cloud environments—public, private, hybrid, or multicloud—and the rise of remote workforces are introducing more infrastructure complexity and potential risks. Disaster recovery for cloud-based systems is critical to an overall business continuity strategy. A system breakdown or unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for enterprises that rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep things running smoothly. 

In addition, data privacy laws and standards stipulate that most organizations are now required to have a disaster recovery strategy. Failure to follow DR plans can result in compliance violations and steep regulatory fines. 

Every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event that stops day-to-day operations, no matter what industry or size. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage that can lead to lost customers and revenue. 

How disaster recovery works

Disaster recovery relies on having a solid plan to get critical applications and infrastructure up and running after an outage—ideally within minutes..

An effective DR plan addresses three different elements for recovery: 

  • Preventive: Ensuring your systems are as secure and reliable as possible, using tools and techniques to prevent a disaster from occurring in the first place. This may include backing up critical data or continuously monitoring environments for configuration errors and compliance violations. 
  • Detective: For rapid recovery, you’ll need to know when a response is necessary. These measures focus on detecting or discovering unwanted events as they happen in real time. 
  • Corrective: These measures are aimed at planning for potential DR scenarios, ensuring backup operations to reduce impact, and putting recovery procedures into action to restore data and systems quickly when the time comes. 

Typically, disaster recovery involves securely replicating and backing up critical data and workloads to a secondary location or multiple locations—disaster recovery sites. A disaster recovery site can be used to recover data from the most recent backup or a previous point in time. Organizations can also switch to using a DR site if the primary location and its systems fail due to an unforeseen event until the primary one is restored.

Types of disaster recovery

The types of disaster recovery you’ll need will depend on your it infrastructure, the type of backup and recovery you use, and the assets you need to protect..

Here are some of the most common technologies and techniques used in disaster recovery: 

  • Backups: With backups, you back up data to an offsite system or ship an external drive to an offsite location. However, backups do not include any IT infrastructure, so they are not considered a full disaster recovery solution. 
  • Backup as a service (BaaS): Similar to remote data backups, BaaS solutions provide regular data backups offered by a third-party provider. 
  • Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): Many cloud providers offer DRaaS, along with cloud service models like IaaS and PaaS . A DRaaS service model allows you to back up your data and IT infrastructure and host them on a third-party provider’s cloud infrastructure. During a crisis, the provider will implement and orchestrate your DR plan to help recover access and functionality with minimal interruption to operations.  
  • Point-in-time snapshots: Also known as point-in-time copies, snapshots replicate data, files, or even an entire database at a specific point in time. Snapshots can be used to restore data as long as the copy is stored in a location unaffected by the event. However, some data loss can occur depending on when the snapshot was made. 
  • Virtual DR: Virtual DR solutions allow you to back up operations and data or even create a complete replica of your IT infrastructure and run it on offsite virtual machines (VMs). In the event of a disaster, you can reload your backup and resume operation quickly. This solution requires frequent data and workload transfers to be effective. 
  • Disaster recovery sites: These are locations that organizations can temporarily use after a disaster event, which contain backups of data, systems, and other technology infrastructure.

Benefits of disaster recovery

Stronger business continuity.

Every second counts when your business goes offline, impacting productivity, customer experience, and your company’s reputation. Disaster recovery helps safeguard critical business operations by ensuring they can recover with minimal or no interruption. 

Enhanced security

DR plans use data backup and other procedures that strengthen your security posture and limit the impact of attacks and other security risks. For example, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer built-in security capabilities, such as advanced encryption, identity and access management, and organizational policy. 

Faster recovery

Disaster recovery solutions make restoring your data and workloads easier so you can get business operations back online quickly after a catastrophic event. DR plans leverage data replication and often rely on automated recovery to minimize downtime and data loss.

Reduced recovery costs

The monetary impacts of a disaster event can be significant, ranging from loss of business and productivity to data privacy penalties to ransoms. With disaster recovery, you can avoid, or at least minimize, some of these costs. Cloud DR processes can also reduce the operating costs of running and maintaining a secondary location.

High availability

Many cloud-based services come with high availability (HA) features that can support your DR strategy. HA capabilities help ensure an agreed level of performance and offer built-in redundancy and automatic failover, protecting data against equipment failure and other smaller-scale events that may impact data availability. 

Better compliance

DR planning supports compliance requirements by considering potential risks and defining a set of specific procedures and protections for your data and workloads in the event of a disaster. This usually includes strong data backup practices, DR sites, and regularly testing your DR plan to ensure that your organization is prepared. 

Planning a disaster recovery strategy

A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy should include detailed emergency response requirements, backup operations, and recovery procedures. DR strategies and plans often help form a broader business continuity strategy, which includes contingency plans to mitigate impact beyond IT infrastructure and systems, allowing all business areas to resume normal operations as soon as possible. 

When it comes to creating disaster recovery strategies, you should carefully consider the following key metrics: 

  • Recovery time objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable length of time that systems and applications can be down without causing significant damage to the business. For example, some applications can be offline for an hour, while others might need to recover in minutes.
  • Recovery point objective (RPO) : The maximum age of data you need to recover to resume operations after a major event. RPO helps to define the frequency of backups. 

These metrics are particularly useful when conducting risk assessments and business impact analysis (BIA) for potential disasters, from moderate to worst-case scenarios. Risk assessments and BIAs evaluate all functional areas of a business and the consequences of any risks, which can help define DR goals and the actions needed to achieve them before or after an event occurs. 

When creating your recovery strategy, it’s useful to consider your RTO and RPO values and pick a DR pattern that will enable you to meet those values and your overall goals. Typically, the smaller your values (or the faster your applications need to recover after an interruption), the higher the cost to run your application. 

Cloud disaster recovery can greatly reduce the costs of RTO and RPO when it comes to fulfilling on-premises requirements for capacity, security, network infrastructure, bandwidth, support, and facilities. A highly managed service on Google Cloud can help you avoid most, if not all, complicating factors and allow you to reduce many business costs significantly. 

For more guidance on using Google Cloud to address disaster recovery, you can read our Disaster recovery planning guide or contact your account manager for help with creating a DR plan.

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What is disaster recovery used for, ensure business resilience.

No matter what happens, a good DR plan can ensure that the business can return to full operations rapidly, without losing data or transactions.

Maintain competitiveness

When a business goes offline, customers are rarely loyal. They turn to competitors to get the goods or services they require. A DR plan prevents this.

Avoid regulatory risks

Many industries have regulations dictating where data can be stored and how it must be protected. Heavy fines result if these mandates are not met.

Avoid data loss

The longer a business’s systems are down, the greater the risk that data will be lost. A robust DR plan minimizes this risk.

Keep customers happy

Meeting customer service level agreements (SLAs) is always a priority. A well-executed DR plan can help businesses achieve SLAs despite challenges.

Maintain reputation

A business that has trouble resuming operations after an outage can suffer brand damage. For that reason, a solid DR plan is critical.

Related products and services

Google offers many products that can be used as building blocks when creating a secure and reliable DR plan, including Cloud Storage .

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The importance of disaster recovery plans for businesses

Technology underpins practically every part of a business; but the more we rely on our tools, networks and applications, the more we have to lose if they fail us. That’s why every business needs a plan in place to quickly restore and recover IT systems in the event of a failure – in other words, a disaster recovery (DR) plan. But knowing what you have to do is often a lot easier than actually doing it. As such, there’s a world of difference between thinking you’re prepared for a disaster and having a comprehensive DR plan in place.

The benefits of a disaster recovery plan

The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to reduce damage or disruption and recover as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster that leads to system failure. DR plans usually have two key components: a recovery time objective (RTO) and a recovery point objective (RPO). The RTO is the time it takes to recover systems after an outage, which determines how much time you need to restore business operations. The RPO reveals how often a backup needs to take place, by setting a limit for the length of time the company can sustain data loss. Creating a DR plan can also have immediate benefits. For instance, because developing the plan involves conducting an audit of your IT assets and Service Level Agreements, you’ll better understand the organisation’s IT estate. You'll know who is responsible for which assets and when they need to recover systems and restore backups.

What makes an effective DR plan?

Your disaster recovery plan might look good on paper, but without practical backing to support its implementation and activation, it is unlikely to live up to its promise.

The rise of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service

With so many businesses adopting cloud-based services and applications, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions are increasingly popular. Even before the pandemic, IDC estimated as many as half of all organisations could not survive a disaster event because of inadequate DR planning and implementation. Research director Phil Goodwin recently stated that “the pendulum has swung towards disaster recovery in the cloud,” because the “cloud has changed the economics of disaster recovery.” Benefits of DRaaS include:

  • Faster recovery with an immediate switch over to a backup system.
  • Flexibility – the ability to recover from many disaster types with a single solution.
  • Security – DRaaS providers offer seamless redundancy with no single point of failure, to keep data securely backed up.
  • Less need for redundant hardware, as DRaaS offers flexible pay-as-you-grow models.

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What is a disaster recovery plan + complete checklist.

Kyle Chin

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a set of detailed, documented guidelines that outline a business’ critical assets and explain how the organization will respond to unplanned incidents. Unplanned incidents or disasters typically include cyber attacks , system failures, power outages, natural disasters, equipment failures, or infrastructure disasters.

More specifically, a disaster recovery plan measures how capable an organization’s ability to restore IT infrastructure functionality and access to critical data, regardless of the disaster event.

A DRP should identify the responsibilities of staff within the organization, outline the step-by-step instructions for the disaster recovery process, and create plans to mitigate and reduce the impact of the incident so that the company can resume basic operations.

Why Is Having a Disaster Recovery Plan Important?

Disaster recovery plans are just one part of an overall security plan and should be established and implemented along with business continuity plans and incident response plans . Without these plans in place, companies can suffer catastrophic damage in form of data loss, data exposure, significantly reduced productivity, penalties and fines, reputational damage, lost revenue, and unplanned recovery expenses.

Creating disaster recovery plans, along with business continuity and incident response plans, can help build confidence with stakeholders, investors, clients, and business partners that demonstrate the capability and preparation to deal with any incident.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is similar to a disaster recovery plan, but a continuity plan is an overarching plan that outlines the steps needed for a business to continue operating in the event of an incident or disaster. A disaster recovery plan considers a more structured approach to the recovery process rather than the continuity process.

Learn more about business continuity plans >

What is an Incident Response Plan?

Incident response plans are critical to any security program because they provide detailed actions for responding and reacting to specific incidents. An incident response plan is focused on handling a cybersecurity incident and its fallout from start to finish, whereas a DR plan is a more robust plan that considers the potential of serious damage to the whole enterprise and how to restore technology.

Learn more about incident response plans >

Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist

Clear disaster response procedures are critical. Implementing disaster recovery quickly minimizes damage and speeds up recovery. The first few hours, in particular, can be critical. The disaster recovery plan’s emergency response procedures section should comprise clear, practical steps in language sufficient for widespread understanding.

A disaster recovery plan should be organized by location and type of disaster. No single disaster recovery plan template exists because every business is different, but a comprehensive disaster recovery plan should cover the following factors:

1. Perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A business impact analysis should be performed before creating a disaster recovery or business continuity plan . The analysis should determine the entire scope of potential aftereffects and impacts in case of a disruption to critical business operations.

Each potential disaster scenario must be planned for, and the systems and subsequent parties that will be affected must also be identified to determine which business components must be protected first to continue operating. The main difference between a BIA and BCP is that a BIA assesses the potential impact while a BCP outlines a plan based on the BIA to ensure operations are minimally affected.

Impacts that should be considered include:

  • Loss of sales or income
  • Cost of recovery (time, labor, equipment, staffing, public relations)
  • Total business downtime
  • Regulatory fines for failed compliance
  • Damage to reputation or customer trust

Ultimately, a BIA provides the necessary context and data for businesses to progress in their risk management and disaster recovery processes.

2. Perform Risk Analysis and Vulnerability Assessments

Risk analysis and vulnerability assessments identify the biggest threats and vulnerabilities that could potentially affect the business. The risk and vulnerability assessment process is designed to help businesses prioritize risk and vulnerability mitigation processes.

Different threats and vulnerabilities can affect different industries, so it’s important to identify which ones pose the biggest risk to your organization. Risks should be classified by the likelihood of occurrence and impact on assets, so the company can begin to plan business recovery processes surrounding those threats.

Risk analyses are important to anticipate and plan for the worst-case scenario and have plans in place to minimize the impact of a critical disaster. Once the risks and vulnerabilities have been identified, businesses can begin to build a risk management plan.

Risk analysis can be accomplished in two ways: qualitative and quantitative risk analysis methods . Qualitative risk analysis assesses risk using subjective data (such as perceived reputational impact) and hypothetical scenarios to determine disaster impact. Quantitative risk analysis measures risk through statistical probabilities and estimated quantifiable impact to determine risk tolerance and risk management cost investments.

Both processes should be conducted together to have a complete overview of the organization’s risk acceptance and resilience, which can then be used to make more informed business decisions.

Learn more about how to perform a cyber risk analysis >

2. Identify Roles and Responsibilities

A disaster recovery plan needs to define the roles and responsibilities of the disaster recovery team or those within the organization responsible for the following processes:

  • Maintaining business continuity systems
  • Incident reporting to executive management, stakeholders, and related authorities
  • Who is in charge of overseeing the crisis and ensuring recovery
  • Team members’ roles in securing and protecting critical business components
  • Contacting third-party vendors or affected parties
  • Liaising with people external to the organization, such as customers, clients, and the press

3. Take Inventory of Assets

To properly manage a cyber incident or cyber threat , it’s important to understand the complete overview of the assets an organization handles. Taking inventory of the organization’s IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, applications, and critical data allows the organization to prioritize the most valuable systems and assets to protect.

Asset inventory should be updated regularly in the disaster recovery plan, especially if there are large changes to the asset management strategy. To facilitate prioritization, the inventory should categorize inventory as follows:

  • Critical assets essential to business operations
  • Important assets, such as applications used once or more per day and whose absence would disrupt typical operations
  • Unimportant assets, which are accessed or used less than once per day

Sensitive data , such as payment details, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII) , can also be subject to compliance requirements . A disaster recovery plan needs to address how critical data is handled during a crisis or disaster in relation to compliance standards.

In addition, it’s important to note that the people with the authority to access sensitive data during normal business operations may differ from those who can access sensitive data during a disaster to ensure its safety.

4. Disaster Recovery Sites

Disaster recovery sites refer to where the company’s assets are located and where they will be moved if disaster strikes. Businesses need to have the sites defined ahead of time should an incident occur, whether the assets are physical or digital.

The three types of recovery sites are as follows:

  • Cold sites — Used to store data backups but cannot immediately run systems.
  • Warm sites — Functional data centers that allow access to critical systems. However, up-to-date customer data may be unavailable.
  • Hot sites — Functioning data centers that contain IT equipment and personnel to use it, as well as up-to-date customer data.

In the event that businesses are still using physical documents and storage media that are still important to business operations, the disaster recovery plan also needs to include where these physical copies will be stored offsite in case of disaster.

As good practice, recovery sites and data backups should be updated regularly. Organizations should implement backup procedures at least a few times per week to ensure business continuity.

5. Disaster Recovery Testing

Much a fire or earthquake drill, it’s necessary to test the disaster recovery procedure and its procedures at least once a year. The plan should be tested in a simulated situation that varies in complexity to ensure protection against all threats.

Testing phases should accomplish the following steps:

  • Identify faults and inconsistencies within the plan that can lead to potential miscommunication or improper incident management
  • Ensure all relevant team members know their specific roles, duties, and workloads
  • Simulate a live cyber attack or other disasters
  • Test success of recovery site upload and backup processes

Regular testing should include updates to the plan and any new threats or vulnerabilities that pose a risk to critical assets.

6. Communication or Reporting Plan

Communicating information about the nature, impact, and cause of a disaster can be critical to the company’s reputation. Timely communication and incident reporting may also be required to comply with cybersecurity regulations . Therefore, the disaster recovery plan needs to define who will deliver what information to whom in the event of a disaster.

Parties that need to be kept up to date will include any or all of the following:

  • Stakeholders or investors
  • Executive management
  • Staff and employees
  • Relevant third-party vendors
  • Governing authorities
  • Customers and clients
  • Media outlets and press
  • Legal counsel

To ensure that communication is clear and prompt, the plan should outline who has primary communication responsibilities and which communication channels they should use.

7. Minimum Physical Facility Requirements

A part of the disaster recovery plan should include the minimum physical facilities a business needs to operate if its usual facility is rendered unusable by a disaster, such as an earthquake. Minimum physical facility requirements should include how much space is required, where it needs to be located, and what equipment is required.

8. RTO and RPO

As part of the disaster recovery planning process, businesses also need to define its RTO and RPO as part of its recovery strategy:

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - A business’s RTO is how long it can tolerate an interruption to normal operations. This can be anything from a few minutes to many hours, depending on the nature of the business.
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The RPO refers to how much data the organization can stand to lose and is normally measured in time, such as an hour of data or 24 hours of data. A business that backs up once daily considers its RPO 24 hours.

Benefits of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Ultimately, the aim of a thorough disaster recovery plan is to facilitate faster response and smoother restoration if disaster strikes, such as a data breach or cyber attack that results in data loss or downtime .

With the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks and human error in the information technology (IT) sphere involving malware like ransomware , affected businesses are seeing rising costs and damages due to poor recovery execution and extended downtimes. It’s imperative to have strong disaster recovery processes as part of the entire business strategy

  • Lower Cyber Insurance Premiums - The modern threat landscape is such that more businesses require cyber insurance to protect themselves in case of a severe cyber attack. The cyber liability insurance industry has reached a point where it can no longer insure all businesses unless they have clearly defined security programs that minimize its overall risk. Having a disaster recovery plan can significantly lower the overall risk profile of a business and thus lower the associated cyber liability insurance premiums .
  • Fewer Recovery Costs - Formal policies and procedures demonstrating a firm’s preparedness for unplanned events can also lower costs during a data breach by helping team members respond to the issues, shortening the data breach lifecycle. The more time that is spent responding to the disaster can lead to increased damages and loss of business.
  • Minimal Penalties - In heavily-regulated sectors like healthcare or public entities, penalties for a data breach and non-compliance with cybersecurity regulations can be costly. The longer a data breach lasts, the more significant the potential penalties can be for non-compliance. A business with a disaster recovery plan will likely recover far more quickly than a company without one.
  • Minimal Business Interruption - Anything facilitating restoring technology will reduce costs for the organization if an unplanned incident interrupts operations. An excellent IT disaster recovery plan can differentiate between minimal impact and complete operational shutdown. When a cyber attack or another incident interrupts critical services, organizations must do all they can to restore technology and normal business processes as quickly as possible.

What Is a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

A DRaaS provider is a third-party provider that uses cloud technology to facilitate rapid restoration of data servers and applications in case of an emergency or disaster.

A third-party solution provider’s security policies and procedures will impact data and database recovery, so it’s highly recommended to work with a trusted vendor that includes data protection as a core part of their offering. Subscribers should also consider the capacity of the provider to ensure it can handle the data transfer required for backing up and restoring the business’s information systems effectively.

Cloud disaster recovery solutions can have the following benefits for modern businesses.

  • Connectivity - One of the benefits of DRaaS is that restorations can be initiated from any location using various kinds of computers, which is ideal in a disaster scenario that may affect physical locations and data. It makes sense to use a provider in another region to avoid the likelihood of the DRaaS provider being affected by the same physical disaster as the subscriber. This way, a business affected by a geographically-specific disaster can use cloud services to create a functional data center in a new location to restore its applications and customer data.
  • Instant Mirroring - Another benefit of DRaaS is that they mirror data changes instantly. This cloud service creates a backup database server that copies the master database server created on the fly. With such a system, restoration can be performed from a point seconds before an outage.
  • Cost-Effective - For many organizations, migrating to cloud services for data management and disaster recovery processes is a cost-effective contingency plan for disruptive events. Excellent cloud service DR providers provide around-the-clock data protection and data management , keeping software up-to-date and monitoring the network to prevent data breaches in the first place. They can also respond quickly and automatically in the event of a disaster.

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Neal Weinberg

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning: The basics

Good business continuity plans will keep your company up and running through interruptions of any kind: power failures, IT system crashes, natural disasters, pandemics and more.

storm disaster recovery disruption rain umbrella tornado challenge weather

Editor’s note: This article, originally published on March 27, 2014, has been updated to more accurately reflect recent trends.

Wildfires in California. A snowstorm in Texas.  Windstorms across the Midwest. Floods in Hawaii. Hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana. Russian hackers and ransomware attacks. And let’s not forget the global pandemic.

If anyone still thinks that having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan isn’t a high priority, you haven’t been paying attention to recent events. As we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are shifting to a new normal that will certainly be more remote, more digital and more cloud-based. Disaster recovery plans will have to evolve to keep up with these changing business conditions.

On top of that, business requirements for disaster recovery have changed dramatically. There was a time when it was acceptable for recovery time to be measured in days or hours. Now it’s minutes. In some cases, business units are demanding zero down time in the event of an unplanned outage.

Here are the basics of a state-of-the-art disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan for 2021 and beyond. (Without getting too hung up on definitions, let’s say that disaster recovery is getting the IT infrastructure back up and running, while business continuity is a broader discipline that gets the business back up and functioning once the lights are back on.) 

Integrate cybersecurity, intrusion detection/response, disaster recovery into a comprehensive data protection plan

For CISOs, the first goal of a disaster recovery plan is to avoid the disaster in the first place, which is becoming increasingly challenging. First, data is no longer safely tucked away in an on-premises data center. It’s distributed across on-premises environments, hyperscale clouds, the edge and SaaS applications. ESG Research Senior Analyst Christophe Bertrand points out that SaaS presents a serious data protection and recovery challenge because “now you have mission critical applications running as a service that you have no control over.”

Second, the pandemic drove millions of employees out of the secure confines of the corporate office to their home offices, where the Wi-Fi is less secure and where employees might be sharing sensitive data on collaboration applications.

Third, hackers took notice of these expanding attack vectors and launched a barrage of new and more targeted ransomware attacks. According to the Sophos State of Ransomware 2020 Report, hackers have moved from spray-and-pray desktop attacks to server-based attacks. “These are highly targeted, sophisticated attacks that take more effort to deploy. However, they are typically far more deadly due to the higher value of assets encrypted and can cripple organizations with multi-million dollar ransom requests,” according to the report .

In response to these changing conditions, CISOs should focus on beefing up endpoint security for remote workers, deploying VPNs and encryption, protecting data at rest no matter where it lives, and also making sure that collaboration tools don’t become a source of security vulnerabilities.

Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)

Organizations need to conduct a thorough business impact analysis to identify and evaluate potential effects of disasters through the lenses of financial fallout, regulatory compliance, legal liability, and employee safety. Gartner estimates that 70% of organizations are making disaster recovery decisions without any business-aligned data points or based on an outdated BIA. “Without the fact base the BIA provides, teams can only guess at the appropriate level of DR and what risks are tolerable. This results in overspend or unmet expectations,” according to Gartner.

Remember, you don’t need to protect everything. Organizations that conduct these exercises are often surprised to discover servers that do nothing but run a routine back-end business process once a month, or even once a year.

Organizations need to prioritize applications by their criticality to the business, and to identify all the dependencies associated with a business process, particularly applications that may have been virtualized across multiple physical servers, might be running in containers in the cloud, or in serverless cloud environments.

Classify data

Along the same lines, you don’t need to protect all data, just the data that you need to keep the business running. You do need to go through the process of locating, identifying, and classifying data. Be sure to protect data that falls under regulatory requirements, customer data, patient data, credit card data, intellectual property, private communications, etc. The good news is that tools can automate data identification and classification.

Consider disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is an increasingly popular option for CISOs at small- to mid-sized organizations who want to cost-effectively improve IT resilience, meet compliance or regulatory requirements, and address resource deficiencies. The DRaaS market is expected to grow at a rate of 12% a year over the next five years, according to Mordor Intelligence . DRaaS services cover the full gamut of disaster recovery and business continuity, providing flexibility and agility to enterprises, according to the Mordor report.

Gartner adds that as the DRaaS market has matured and vendor offerings have become more industrialized, the size and scope of DRaaS implementations have increased significantly, compared with a few years ago.

Develop a solid communication plan

Simply getting servers back up and running is essentially meaningless unless everyone knows their roles and responsibilities. Do people have the appropriate cell phone numbers and email addresses to share information? Do the relevant stakeholders have a playbook that spells out how to respond to a crisis in terms of contacting law enforcement, outside legal teams, utility companies, key technology and supply chain partners, senior leadership, the broader employee base, external PR teams, etc.?

Depending on the nature of the disaster, networking groups might need to establish new lines of connectivity for remote workers and reconfigure traffic flows; maintenance teams might need to perform remote troubleshooting, security teams might need to re-set firewalls, change access policies, extend security protection to new devices or to cloud-based resources. The biggest problem in a disaster isn’t related to data backups, it’s not having the right people in place and understanding all the steps required for the business to recover, says Bertrand.

Automate testing

To test disaster preparedness, companies traditionally conduct tabletop exercises in which key players physically come together to play out DR scenarios. However, only one-third of organizations perceive the exercises as “highly effective,”  according to a July study  by Osterman Research in association with Immersive Labs, a company that develops human-readiness skills in cybersecurity. The research also found that organizations don’t perform tabletop exercises often enough to keep up with evolving threats and that these exercises cost an average of $30,000. During the pandemic, it’s fair to assume that tabletop exercises fell by the wayside.

Doug Matthews, vice-president of enterprise data protection at Veritas, says there’s a better way. New tools can automatically test backup and recovery procedures on an ongoing basis and identify potential issues that need to be addressed. Modern testing solutions are also able to use sandboxing technology to create safe environments in which companies can test the recoverability of applications without impacting production networks.

Create immutable data backups

Ransomware attackers are targeting backup repositories, particularly in the cloud. They are also targeting SaaS applications. In response, organizations should keep one copy of data that can’t be altered. “Be sure that you have an immutable copy of backup data that nobody can touch,” advises Matthews, who says companies should have three copies of data at all times, not just two.

Companies should also investigate isolated recovery environments, such as air gapping, in which one copy of the data lives in an environment not connected to the production environment.

Consider data re-use

“Business is the data and data is the business,” says Bertrand. Once organizations have a copy of their important data sitting in a safe backup environment, why not think about ways to reuse it to advance the company’s digital transformation efforts.

The idea is for organizations to “understand what you have, where it is, how to protect it, store it and optimize it.”  Ultimately, Bertrand predicts that organizations will evolve an intelligent data strategy that encompasses regulatory compliance, disaster recovery/business continuity and data analytics.

Perform continuous updates

CISOs updating their DR/BC plans should take their cue from DevOps. It’s not about one-and-done, it’s about continuous improvement. DR planners need to be plugged into any changes at the company that might affect recoverability, including employees working from home permanently, stores or remote offices opening or closing, applications being replaced by SaaS, data moving to the edge, or DevOps moving to the cloud. Also, the technology is constantly improving, so be on the lookout for new tools that can help automate DR/BC processes. The plan should not be sitting on the shelf collecting dust. It should be updated on a regular basis.

Do long-term planning

In light of everything that has happened over the past 12 months, it’s a good time to shift thinking about DR/BC from reactive to proactive. Unfortunately, between public health emergencies, climate change and the increase in cyberattacks, disasters seem to be occurring more often and are certainly more devastating. DR/BC plans need to get ahead of the threats, not simply respond to them.

For example, if your company is in California, your DR/BC plan has to assume that there will be power outages from next season’s wildfires. Companies concerned about losing power when the next natural disaster hits might want to think about generating their own power from alternative sources.

A successful DR/BC plan requires that companies perform the basics, but it is also an opportunity for companies to find creative and innovative ways to keep the business running when disaster hits.

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Neal Weinberg is a freelance technology writer and editor. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster recovery plan definition.

What is a disaster recovery plan? A disaster recovery plan (DRP), disaster recovery implementation plan, or IT disaster recovery plan is a recorded policy and/or process that is designed to assist an organization in executing recovery processes in response to a disaster to protect business IT infrastructure and more generally promote recovery.

The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to comprehensively explain the consistent actions that must be taken before, during, and after a natural or man-made disaster so that the entire team can take those actions. A disaster recovery plan should address both man-made disasters that are intentional, such as fallout from terrorism or hacking, or accidental, such as an equipment failure.

What is a disaster recovery plan ?

Organizations of all sizes generate and manage massive amounts of data, much of it mission critical. The impact of corruption or data loss from human error, hardware failure, malware, or hacking can be substantial. Therefore, it is essential to create a disaster recovery plan for the restoration of business data from a data backup image.

It is most effective to develop an information technology (IT) disaster recovery plan in conjunction with the business continuity plan (BCP). A business continuity plan is a complete organizational plan that consists of five components:

1. Business resumption plan 2. Occupant emergency plan 3. Continuity of operations plan 4. Incident management plan (IMP) 5. Disaster recovery plan

Generally, components one through three do not touch upon IT infrastructure at all. The incident management plan typically establishes procedures and a structure to address cyber attacks against IT systems during normal times, so it does not deal with the IT infrastructure during disaster recovery. For this reason, the disaster recovery plan is the only component of the BCP of interest to IT.

Among the first steps in developing such adisaster recovery strategy is business impact analysis, during which the team should develop IT priorities and recovery time objectives. The team should time technology recovery strategies for restoring applications, hardware, and data to meet business recovery needs.

Every situation is unique and there is no single correct way to develop a disaster recovery plan. However, there are three principal goals of disaster recovery that form the core of most DRPs:

  • prevention, including proper backups, generators, and surge protectors
  • detection of new potential threats, a natural byproduct of routine inspections
  • correction, which might include holding a “lessons learned” brainstorming session and securing proper insurance policies

What should a disaster recovery plan include?

Although specific disaster recovery plan formats may vary, the structure of a disaster recovery plan should include several features:

Goals A statement of goals will outline what the organization wants to achieve during or after a disaster, including the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO). The recovery point objective refers to how much data (in terms of the most recent changes) the company is willing to lose after a disaster occurs. For example, an RPO might be to lose no more than one hour of data, which means data backups must occur at least every hour to meet this objective.

Recovery time objective or RTO refers to the acceptable downtime after an outage before business processes and systems must be restored to operation. For example, the business must be able to return to operations within 4 hours in order to avoid unacceptable impacts to business continuity.

Personnel Every disaster recovery plan must detail the personnel who are responsible for the execution of the DR plan, and make provisions for individual people becoming unavailable.

IT inventory An updated IT inventory must list the details about all hardware and software assets, as well as any cloud services necessary for the company’s operation, including whether or not they are business critical, and whether they are owned, leased, or used as a service.

Backup procedures The DRP must set forth how each data resource is backed up – exactly where, on which devices and in which folders, and how the team should recover each resource from backup.

Disaster recovery procedures These specific procedures, distinct from backup procedures, should detail all emergency responses, including last-minute backups, mitigation procedures, limitation of damages, and eradication of cybersecurity threats.

Disaster recovery sites Any robust disaster recovery plan should designate a hot disaster recovery site. Located remotely, all data can be frequently backed up to or replicated at a hot disaster recovery site — an alternative data center holding all critical systems. This way, when disaster strikes, operations can be instantly switched over to the hot site.

Restoration procedures Finally, follow best practices to ensure a disaster recovery plan includes detailed restoration procedures for recovering from a loss of full systems operations. In other words, every detail to get each aspect of the business back online should be in the plan, even if you start with a disaster recovery plan template. Here are some procedures to consider at each step.

Include not just objectives such as the results of risk analysis and RPOs, RTOs, and SLAs, but also a structured approach for meeting these goals. The DRP must address each type of downtime and disaster with a step-by-step plan, including data loss, flooding, natural disasters, power outages, ransomware, server failure, site-wide outages, and other issues. Be sure to enrich any IT disaster recovery plan template with these critical details.

Create a list of IT staff including contact information, roles, and responsibilities. Ensure each team member is familiar with the company disaster recovery plan before it is needed so that individual team members have the necessary access levels and passwords to meet their responsibilities. Always designate alternates for any emergency, even if you think your team can’t be affected.

Address business continuity planning and disaster recovery by providing details about mission-critical applications in your DRP. Include accountable parties for both troubleshooting any issues and ensuring operations are running smoothly. If your organization will use cloud backup services or disaster recovery services, vendor name and contact information, and a list of authorized employees who can request support during a disaster should be in the plan; ideally the vendor and organizational contacts should know of each other.

Media communication best practices are also part of a robust disaster recovery and business continuity plan. A designated public relations contact and media plan are particularly useful to high profile organizations, enterprises, and users who need 24/7 availability, such as government agencies or healthcare providers. Look for disaster recovery plan examples in your industry or vertical for specific best practices and language.

Benefits of a disaster recovery plan

Obviously, a disaster recovery plan details scenarios for reducing interruptions and resuming operations rapidly in the aftermath of a disaster. It is a central piece of the business continuity plan and should be designed to prevent data loss and enable sufficient IT recovery.

Beyond the clear benefit of improved business continuity under any circumstances, having a company disaster recovery plan can help an organization in several other important ways.

Cost-efficiency Disaster recovery plans include various components that improve cost-efficiency. The most important elements include prevention, detection, and correction, as discussed above. Preventative measures reduce the risks from man-made disasters. Detection measures are designed to quickly identify problems when they do happen, and corrective measures restore lost data and enable a rapid resumption of operations.

Achieving cost-efficiency goals demands regular maintenance of IT systems in their optimal condition, high-level analysis of potential threats, and implementation of innovative cybersecurity solutions. Keeping software updated and systems optimally maintained saves time and is more cost-effective. Adopting cloud-based data management as a part of disaster recovery planning can further reduce the costs of backups and maintenance.

Increased productivity Designating specific roles and responsibilities along with accountability as a disaster recovery plan demands increases effectiveness and productivity in your team. It also ensures redundancies in personnel for key tasks, improving sick day productivity, and reducing the costs of turnover.

Improved customer retention Customers do not easily forgive failures or downtime, especially if they result in loss of sensitive data. Disaster recovery planning helps organizations meet and maintain a higher quality of service in every situation. Reducing the risks your customers face from data loss and downtime ensures they receive better service from you during and after a disaster, shoring up their loyalty.

Compliance Enterprise business users, financial markets, healthcare patients, and government entities, all rely on availability, uptime, and the disaster recovery plans of important organizations. These organizations in turn rely on their DRPs to stay compliant with industry regulations such as HIPAA and FINRA.

Scalability Planning disaster recovery allows businesses to identify innovative solutions to reduce the costs of archive maintenance, backups, and recovery. Cloud-based data storage and related technologies enhance and simplify the process and add flexibility and scalability.

The disaster recovery planning process can reduce the risk of human error, eliminate superfluous hardware, and streamline the entire IT process. In this way, the planning process itself becomes one of the advantages of disaster recovery planning, streamlining the business, and rendering it more profitable and resilient before anything ever goes wrong.

Ways to develop a disaster recovery plan

There are several steps in the development of a disaster recovery plan. Although these may vary somewhat based on the organization, here are the basic disaster recovery plan steps:

Risk assessment First, perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA) that addresses many potential disasters. Analyze each functional area of the organization to determine possible consequences from middle of the road scenarios to “worst-case” situations, such as total loss of the main building. Robust disaster recovery plans set goals by evaluating risks up front, as part of the larger business continuity plan, to allow critical business operations to continue for customers and users as IT addresses the event and its fallout.

Consider infrastructure and geographical risk factors in your risk analysis. For example, the ability of employees to access the data center in case of a natural disaster, whether or not you use cloud backup, and whether you have a single site or multiple sites are all relevant here. Be sure to include this information, even if you’re working from a sample disaster recovery plan.

Evaluate critical needs Next, establish priorities for operations and processing by evaluating the critical needs of each department. Prepare written agreements for selected alternatives, and include details specifying all special security procedures, availability, cost, duration, guarantee of compatibility, hours of operation, what constitutes an emergency, non-mainframe resource requirements, system testing, termination conditions, a procedure notifying users of system changes, personnel requirements, specs on required processing hardware and other equipment, a service extension negotiation process, and other contractual issues.

Set disaster recovery plan objectives Create a list of mission-critical operations to plan for business continuity, and then determine which data, applications, equipment, or user accesses are necessary to support those functions. Based on the cost of downtime, determine each function’s recovery time objective (RTO). This is the target amount of time in hours, minutes, or seconds an operation or application can be offline without an unacceptable business impact.

Determine the recovery point objective (RPO), or the point in time back to which you must recover the application. This is essentially the amount of data the organization can afford to lose.

Assess any service level agreements (SLAs) that your organization has promised to users, executives, or other stakeholders.

Collect data and create the written document Collect data for your plan using pre-formatted forms as needed. Data to collect in this stage may include:

  • lists (critical contact information list, backup employee position listing, master vendor list, master call list, notification checklist)
  • inventories (communications equipment, data center computer hardware, documentation, forms, insurance policies, microcomputer hardware and software, office equipment, off-site storage location equipment, workgroup hardware, etc.)
  • schedules for software and data files backup/retention
  • procedures for system restore/recovery
  • temporary disaster recovery locations
  • other documentation, inventories, lists, and materials

Organize and use the collected data in your written, documented plan.

Test and revise Next, develop criteria and procedures for testing the plan. This is essential to ensure the organization has adopted compatible, feasible backup procedures and facilities, and to identify areas that should be modified. It also allows the team to be trained, and proves the value of the DRP and ability of the organization to withstand disasters.

Finally, test the plan based on the criteria and procedures. Conduct an initial dry run or structured walk-through test and correct any problems, ideally outside normal operational hours. Types of business disaster recovery plan tests include: disaster recovery plan checklist tests, full interruption tests, parallel tests, and simulation tests.

The recovery point objective, or RPO, refers to how much data (in terms of the most recent changes) the company is willing to lose after a disaster occurs. For example, an RPO might be to lose no more than one hour of data, which means data backups must occur at least every hour to meet this objective.

The RPO answers this question: “How much data could be lost without significantly impacting the business?”

Example: If the RPO for a business is 20 hours and the last available good copy of data after an outage is 18 hours old, we are still within the RPO’s parameters.

In other words, the RTO answers the question: “How much time after notification of business process disruption should it take to recover?”

To compare RPO and RTO , consider that RPO means a variable amount of data that would need to be re-entered after a loss or would be lost altogether during network downtime. In contrast, RTO refers to how much real time can elapse before the disruption unacceptably impedes normal business operations.

It is important to expose the gap between actuals and objectives set forth in the disaster recovery plan. Only business disruption and disaster rehearsals can expose actuals—specifically Recovery Point Actual (RPA) and Recovery Time Actual (RTA). Refining these differences brings the plan up to speed.

Strategies and tools for a disaster recovery plan

The right strategies and tools help implement a disaster recovery plan.

Traditional on-premises recovery strategies The IT team should develop disaster recovery strategies for IT applications, systems, and data. This includes desktops, data, networks, connectivity, servers, wireless devices, and laptops. Identify IT resources that support time-sensitive business processes and functions so their recovery times match.

Information technology systems require connectivity, data, hardware, and software. The entire system may fail due to a single component, so recovery strategies should anticipate the loss of one or more of these system components:

  • Secure, climate-controlled computer room environment with backup power supply
  • Connectivity to a service provider
  • Hardware such as desktop and laptop computers, networks, wireless devices and peripherals, and servers
  • Software applications such as electronic mail, electronic data interchange, enterprise resource management, and office productivity

Data and restoration For business applications that cannot tolerate downtime, actual parallel computing, data mirroring, or multiple data center synchronization is possible yet costly. Other solutions for mission critical business applications and sensitive data include cloud backup and cloud-native disaster recovery, which reduce the need for expensive hardware and IT infrastructure.

Internal recovery strategies Some enterprises store data at multiple facilities and configure hardware to run similar applications from data center to data center when needed. Assuming off-site data backup or data mirroring are taking place, processing can continue and data can be restored at an alternate site under these circumstances. However, this is a costly solution, and one that demands an internal solution that is itself infallible.

Cloud-based disaster recovery strategies Cloud-based vendors offer Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which are essentially “hot sites” for IT disaster recovery hosted in the cloud. DRaaS leverages the cloud to provide fully configured recovery sites that mirror the applications in the local data center. This allows users a more immediate response, allowing them the ability to recover critical applications in the cloud, keeping them ready for use at the time of a disaster.

Vendors can host and manage applications, data security services, and data streams, enabling access to information via web browser at the primary business site or other sites. These vendors can typically enhance cybersecurity because their ongoing monitoring for outages offers data filtering and detection of malware threats. If the vendor detects an outage at the client site, they hold all client data automatically until the system is restored. In this sense, the cloud is essential to security planning and disaster recovery.

Does Druva offer a cloud disaster recovery plan ?

With Druva’s cloud-native disaster recovery plan, workloads on-premises or in the cloud back up directly to the Druva Cloud Platform, built on AWS. This eliminates recovery complexities by enabling automated runbook execution and one-click disaster recovery. Druva’s cloud-native disaster recovery includes failover and failback, either back to on-premises systems or to any AWS region or account without hardware, a managed DR site, or excessive administration.

Watch the video below for a demo, and discover Druva's innovative one-click solutions for on-premises and cloud workloads on the disaster recovery page of the website .

Related Terms

Now that you’ve learned about the disaster recovery plan, brush up on these related terms with Druva’s glossary:

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What is Disaster Recovery, and why is it so important?

  • 14 September 2021
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What-is-Disaster-Recovery-and-why-is-it-so-important

Every business is terrified at the prospect of a computer system failure. This is why it is crucial to have a good Disaster Recovery Plan – a comprehensive roadmap outlining what to do when your systems fail due to a disaster or human error.

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What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery is the process of restoring your business-critical systems after a disaster, using properly scheduled backups . To be able to properly recover from a disaster, you need to store a copy of your data in a remote location. This way, your backup will not be vulnerable to any disasters that may occur locally (such as a fire or a flood), and it will also be protected from cybercriminals or human errors.

Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly relevant, but if, for example, a flood destroys your servers, you will lose all the data on those servers. So, if you do not have a backup available in an external location, you will lose all your data, which makes two dramatic events at the same time. That is why Disaster Recovery focuses on keeping a copy of all the data elsewhere. In the event of a disaster, you can switch to these offsite servers (or copy the data again to your own new servers) and get back to work.

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a document that outlines the steps you need to take in order to recover from a disaster. Think of it as a roadmap for when things go wrong.

A company uses internal servers to store its customer data. In the event of a flood in the region where the company is based, all the servers suffer water damage. The Disaster Recovery Plan is put into action immediately: the person in charge contacts the provider who has backed up the data to an external data centre as quickly as possible. The most recent backup is then made available to the employees via the cloud. This way, the company can immediately get back to work, with minimal downtime or data loss.

Combell as a partner for your Disaster Recovery

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Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity

People often get Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity mixed up, but the two are fundamentally different in purpose.

With a Business Continuity Plan, you focus on keeping your systems running as smoothly as possible in difficult times, and on avoiding downtime – in other words, the continuity of your business. Such a plan sets out how your staff can work efficiently in the event of difficulties, and how access to your data can be maintained. You can do this by keeping your servers up to date, thoroughly testing changes in your applications for errors, and choosing the right capacity for your systems.

disaster-recovery-issues

A Disaster Recovery Plan is necessary when your Business Continuity Plan fails. Because no matter how well you protect your systems against downtime, your IT infrastructure can always be affected by a disaster or human error (intentional or unintentional). In such situations, Disaster Recovery makes it a simple matter to quickly get back on your feet and carry on, thanks to your backups.

The need for a Disaster Recovery Plan

There is no doubt that data and proper IT operation are key to your business. If your company relies on its IT systems, it is a real nightmare when these suddenly stop working. Downtime can result in huge losses in terms of reputation and efficiency, and consequently affect your turnover. That is why it is vital to have a Disaster Recovery Plan.

Tip: calculate how much downtime will cost you

Are you wondering how much it would cost you if your business was offline for a while? Find out using our downtime calculator .

Just as a company has a fire emergency evacuation plan in case of fire, that same company also needs a Disaster Recovery Plan to protect its data and ensure proper operation of the company when things go wrong.

Between 40% and 60% of companies affected by a disaster go bankrupt. A good Disaster Recovery Plan will help you not to become part of these statistics.

A Disaster Recovery Plan or DRP is like an insurance policy: you hope you will never need it, but when the worst happens, you can feel relieved that you have one. Because without a good DRP, things can go terribly wrong: according to figures from the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 40% to 60% of companies go bankrupt after a disaster. So make sure you do not become part of these statistics!

The building blocks of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Each company has its own specific needs, which is why every DRP is different. A good DRP partner will help you draw up an effective plan, by examining your data and IT usage. But you know best how certain things work within your company, and where you want to put the emphasis in your DRP.

Analysing the ICT environment

The purpose of a Disaster Recovery Plan is to get your ICT environment working as it did before the disaster, so it is important to know how your current environment is working. In other words: what are your most important data, how much data do you definitely do not want to lose in a worst case scenario, who manages your ICT environment, and where are the most vulnerable points?

Roles and responsibilities

Every Belgian company must (by law) have a fire safety service. And the same should apply in the event of digital failures. Who comes into action when things go seriously wrong with your computer systems?

In the event of major problems, it really helps to have a clear roadmap, so that a disaster recovery team knows exactly what to do. This way, nobody has to run around like a headless chicken, and the plan brings peace of mind.

Risk analysis

A risk analysis is actually a projection of your worst nightmares: what disasters can occur, and what impact does a particular disaster have on the failure of your systems? And, ultimately, what impact does the loss of business-critical applications have on your business?

Of course, such a risk analysis can only be carried out if your ICT environment has been properly analysed in advance.

Setting priorities

After analysing your current operation, you can start setting priorities within your company. Which services and systems are critical to the proper functioning of your company? If you immediately think to yourself 'all of them', then we are afraid that you will end up with a hefty price tag for your Disaster Recovery solution.

Unfortunately, if you want to keep the costs of your backups under control, you have to make choices. It goes without saying that, for example, your internal chat system is less important to your employees than the operation of your web store or your ERP system . It is therefore essential to identify the most important (i.e. business-critical) elements of your IT department and to regularly back them all up.

When you know which elements are critical to the operation of your business, you can start looking at the Recovery Time Objective and the Recovery Point Objective for each of those elements.

RTO and RPO: the basis for your Disaster Recovery Plan

When you draw up a Disaster Recovery Plan, you will often come across the terms RPO ( Recovery Point Objective ) and RTO ( Recovery Time Objective ). Both are decisive factors for a good restart.

RPO: Recovery Point Objective

With the Recovery Point Objective , you indicate the maximum amount of data you can lose. It is the point to which you will return after a disaster. Simply put: it is the amount of time between two backups.

For a bakery or a shoe shop, an RPO of one or more days may be acceptable, but what about an international web store? Ten seconds of data loss may already result in significant losses.

It is therefore important to analyse how much data you can afford to lose.

RTO: Recovery Time Objective

Besides your RPO, your Recovery Time Objective is also an important factor, as it refers to the maximum period of time you can remain inactive after a disaster. For some, a higher RTO (meaning a few hours without your IT systems) is not a problem, but for other companies, it could be a total disaster.

So, once again, you have to weigh up the impact of your downtime, and how long can you survive without your business-critical applications.

disaster-recovery-scheme-EN

RPO and RTO = 0?

In an ideal world, your RPO and RTO would always be equal to 0, but unfortunately this is not always possible – and certainly not for all your applications. Backing up all your data and restoring them immediately is a very resource intensive and therefore pricey undertaking. So, once again, you will have to prioritise.

How to get started with your own Disaster Recovery Plan?

The steps above will get you a long way, but of course, you do not have to find a data centre yourself and install your own servers there: there are enough providers who have the expertise to help you with the technical side of things. But carrying out a risk analysis and drawing up a comprehensive roadmap for your Disaster Recovery are also things that a provider like Combell will gladly assist you with.

Disaster Recovery as a Service

Aside from the roadmap to define your Disaster Recovery strategy (in the hope that it will never be necessary), you must of course be able to store your data somewhere. And a provider such as Combell offers several options for this, which are offered 'as a Service'. This means that you do not have to worry about the infrastructure, the technical issues or security: your provider takes care of absolutely everything!

1 in 5 companies does not have a Disaster Recovery Plan yet. Is your company one of them? Do not wait any longer and ask Combell for more information!

Frequently asked questions

Disaster Recovery is the process of restoring data and restarting your business after a disaster or cyberattack. Disaster Recovery involves the use of backups in order to be able to resume business operations quickly. In this context, a Disaster Recovery Plan is your roadmap for a smooth restart.

What is crucial for a Disaster Recovery Plan?

When drawing up a Disaster Recovery Plan, it is important to analyse the current operation of your company. This involves looking at the distribution of roles within your IT department, identifying your business-critical applications , carrying out a risk analysis to determine what could go wrong and prioritising the data that you deem most important. But what matters most is the way your data are backed up.

What do RTO and RPO mean?

RTO means Recovery Time Objective: it is the maximum amount of time it may take for you to be able to use your services again. RPO means Recovery Point Objective: it is the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose in the event of a disaster.

What is the best Disaster Recovery strategy?

Disaster Recovery is different for every company, because everyone's priorities are different. Please contact our experts to find out what strategy is best for you.

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What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is the process by which an organization anticipates and addresses technology-related disasters. The process of preparing for and recovering from any event that prevents a workload or system from fulfilling its business objectives in its primary deployed location, such as power outages, natural events, or security issues. Disaster recovery targets are measured with Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). The failures handled by disaster recovery tend to be rarer than those covered by high availability and are larger scale disaster events. Disaster recovery includes an organization's procedures and policies to recover quickly from such events.

Why is disaster recovery important?

A disaster is an unexpected problem resulting in a slowdown, interruption, or network outage in an IT system. Outages come in many forms, including the following examples:

  • An earthquake or fire
  • Technology failures
  • System incompatibilities
  • Simple human error 
  • Intentional unauthorized access by third parties

These disasters disrupt business operations, cause customer service problems, and result in revenue loss. A disaster recovery plan helps organizations respond promptly to disruptive events and provides key benefits.

Ensures business continuity

When a disaster strikes, it can be detrimental to all aspects of the business and is often costly. It also interrupts normal business operations, as the team’s productivity is reduced due to limited access to tools they require to work. A disaster recovery plan prompts the quick restart of backup systems and data so that operations can continue as scheduled. 

Enhances system security

Integrating data protection, backup, and restoring processes into a disaster recovery plan limits the impact of ransomware, malware, or other security risks for business. For example, data backups to the cloud have numerous built-in security features to limit suspicious activity before it impacts the business. 

Improves customer retention

If a disaster occurs, customers question the reliability of an organization’s security practices and services. The longer a disaster impacts a business, the greater the customer frustration. A good disaster recovery plan mitigates this risk by training employees to handle customer inquiries. Customers gain confidence when they observe that the business is well-prepared to handle any disaster. 

Reduces recovery costs

Depending on its severity, a disaster causes both loss of income and productivity. A robust disaster recovery plan avoids unnecessary losses as systems return to normal soon after the incident. For example, cloud storage solutions are a cost-effective data backup method. You can manage, monitor, and maintain data while the business operates as usual. 

How does disaster recovery work?

Disaster recovery focuses on getting applications up and running within minutes of an outage. Organizations address the following three components.

To reduce the likelihood of a technology-related disaster, businesses need a plan to ensure that all key systems are as reliable and secure as possible. Because humans cannot control a natural disaster, prevention only applies to network problems, security risks, and human errors. You must set up the right tools and techniques to prevent disaster. For example, system-testing software that auto-checks all new configuration files before applying them can prevent configuration mistakes and failures. 

Anticipation

Anticipation includes predicting possible future disasters, knowing the consequences, and planning appropriate disaster recovery procedures. It is challenging to predict what can happen, but you can come up with a disaster recovery solution with knowledge from previous situations and analysis. For example, backing up all critical business data to the cloud in anticipation of future hardware failure of on-premises devices is a pragmatic approach to data management.

Mitigation is how a business responds after a disaster scenario. A mitigation strategy aims to reduce the negative impact on normal business procedures. All key stakeholders know what to do in the event of a disaster, including the following steps.

  • Updating documentation
  • Conducting regular disaster recovery testing
  • Identifying manual operating procedures in the event of an outage
  • Coordinating a disaster recovery strategy with corresponding personnel

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

What are the key elements of a disaster recovery plan?

An effective disaster recovery plan includes the following key elements. 

Internal and external communication

The team responsible for creating, implementing, and managing the disaster recovery plan must communicate with each other about their roles and responsibilities. If a disaster happens, the team should know who is responsible for what and how to communicate with employees, customers, and each other. 

Recovery timeline

The disaster recovery team must decide on goals and time frames for when systems should be back to normal operations after a disaster. Some industries’ timelines may be longer than others, while others need to be back to normal in a matter of minutes. 

The timeline should address the following two objectives.

Recovery time objective 

The recovery time objective (RTO) is a metric that determines the maximum amount of time that passes before you complete disaster recovery. Your RTOs may vary depending on impacted IT infrastructure and systems.

Recovery point objective

A recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of time acceptable for data loss after a disaster. For example, if your RPO is minutes or hours, you will have to back up your data constantly to mirror sites instead of just once at the end of the day.

Data backups

The disaster recovery plan determines how you back up your data. Options include cloud storage, vendor-supported backups, and internal offsite data backups. To account for natural disaster events, backups should not be onsite. The team should determine who will back up the data, what information will be backed up, and how to implement the system.

Testing and optimization 

You must test your disaster recovery plan at least once or twice per year. You can document and fix any gaps that you identify in these tests. Similarly, you should update all security and data protection strategies frequently to prevent inadvertent unauthorized access.

How can you create a disaster recovery team?

A disaster recovery team includes a collaborative team of experts, such as IT specialists and individuals in leadership roles, who will be crucial to the team. You should have somebody on the team who takes care of the following key areas.

Crisis management

The individual in charge of crisis management implements the disaster recovery plan right away. They communicate with other team members and customers, and they coordinate the disaster recovery process. 

Business continuity

The business continuity manager ensures that the disaster recovery plan aligns with results from business impact analysis. They include business continuity planning in the disaster recovery strategy. 

Impact recovery and assessment

Impact assessment managers are experts in IT infrastructure and business applications. They assess and fix network infrastructure, servers, and databases. They also manage other disaster recovery tasks, such as the following examples.

  • Application integrations
  • Data consistency maintenance
  • Application settings and configuration

What are the best disaster recovery methods?

When disaster recovery planning, businesses implement one or several of the following methods.

Backing up data is one of the easiest methods of disaster recovery that all businesses implement. Backing up important data entails storing data offsite, in the cloud, or on a removable drive. You should back up data frequently to keep it up to date. For example, by backing up to AWS , businesses get a flexible and scalable infrastructure that protects all data types. 

Data center disaster recovery

In the event of certain types of natural disasters, appropriate equipment can protect your data center and contribute to rapid disaster recovery. For example, fire suppression tools help equipment and data survive through a blaze, and backup power sources support businesses’ continuity in case of power failure. Similarly, AWS data centers have innovative systems that protect them from human-made and natural risks.

Virtualization 

Businesses back up their data and operations using offsite virtual machines (VMs) not affected by physical disasters. With virtualization as part of the disaster recovery plan, businesses automate some processes, recovering faster from a natural disaster. The continuous transfer of data and workloads to VMs like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is essential for effective virtualization. 

Disaster recovery as a service

Disaster recovery services like AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery can move a company’s computer processing and critical business operations to its own cloud services in the event of a disaster. Therefore, normal operations can continue from the provider’s location, even if on-premises servers are down. Elastic Disaster Recovery also protects from Regions in the cloud going down. 

In the event of a natural disaster, a company moves its operations to another rarely used physical location, called a cold site. This way, employees have a place to work, and business functions can continue as normal. This type of disaster recovery does not protect or recover important data, so another disaster recovery method must be used alongside this one.    

How can AWS help with disaster recovery?

Elastic Disaster Recovery is a disaster recovery service that reduces downtime and data loss with the fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. It can decrease your RPO to seconds and RTO to just a few minutes. You can quickly recover operations after unexpected events, such as software issues or data center hardware failures. It is also a flexible solution, so you can add or remove replicating servers and test various applications without specialized skill sets.

Elastic Disaster Recovery includes the following benefits.

  • Reduces costs by removing idle recovery site resources, so you pay for the full disaster recovery site only when needed
  • Converts cloud-based applications to run natively on AWS
  • Restores applications within minutes, at their most up-to-date state, or from a previous point in time in case of security incidents

Get started with disaster recovery on AWS by creating an AWS account today. 

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The Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan

By Johnny Nugent 

Although sometimes taken lightly or  often remembered as  more of  an afterthought ,  disaster recovery plans  are extremely important to any business, especially a manufacturing business that relies on safely storing lots of data.   

There are many risks to your data out there, including fire, natural disaster (snowstorm, tornado, earthquake),  power outages  or other connectivity loss ,  and  cyber-attacks  to name a few. Be sure to develop and test a solid disaster recovery plan every so often to minimize downtime and lost revenue.    

Top  Three  Benefits of a Di saster Recovery Plan  

Prevent data loss    .

This may seem  like an obvious benefit of a disaster recovery plan, but the planning and testing you put into your disaster recovery plan may determine just how much data your organization loses during a disaster.  Data is of the utmost importance to every manufacturing company so minimizing as much data loss as possible during a disaster is a benefit of deve loping a solid plan.    

Minimize Downtime    

After preserving data, minimizing lost profits is  the next goal and benefit of developing disaster recovery plan. When disaster strikes there is often some downtime that comes with it as employees work to recover   data and get systems back up and running.  Downtime typically comes with lost profits  because  employe e s  can’t focus on their day-to-day revenue producing tasks.    

Maintain  Customer Satisfaction  

Keeping customers happy and coming back for more is the nu mber one priority of every business and in this  fast-paced  world we live in ,  customers expect perfection. If a busines s isn’t meeting a customer's expectations, they will find another business to provide the same goods or services. Reducing the risk of downtime and data loss is crucial to keeping  customer satisfaction  high.   

Conclusion  

Disaster recovery planning is an important process for every business to go through. A disaster recovery plan requires identifying threats, setting goals of disaster recovery, researching the best ways to achieve those objecti ves, and testing the plan.  Be sure to revisit and test your disaster recovery plan to ensure your business has the resilience to last through any disaster.   

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why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Why Is A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) So Important?

Disaster Recovery Plan DRP

Avoiding downtime by planning properly, today; this is what disaster recovery it’s all about.

The best plan for your business in dealing with disasters is to be prepared before the disaster occurs. Disasters, natural and man-made, are sometimes unavoidable, so we need to be ready to keep the business running no matter the circumstances surrounding.

A disaster recovery plan is a documented, structured approach that describes how an organization can quickly resume work after an unplanned incident. A DRP is an essential part of a business continuity plan. The recovery plan should be applied to the aspects of an organization, especially the ones that depend on a functioning IT infrastructure; all processes and technology or computer-oriented.

A DRP aims to help an organization resolve data loss and recover system functionality so that it can perform in the aftermath of an incident, even if it operates at a minimum level.

The step-by-step plan consists of detailing the precautions needed to minimize the effects of a disaster, so the organization can continue to operate or quickly resume critical functions. Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs. Before generating a detailed plan, an organization often performs a business impact analysis and a risk analysis so recovery objectives can be established to all the operational areas.

How extensive should your recovery plan be?

Nowadays, with cybercrime and security breaches becoming more sophisticated, it is important for you as an organization to define your data recovery and protection strategies. The ability to quickly handle incidents can reduce downtime and minimize both financial and reputational damages.

Disaster recovery plans allow organizations to ensure they meet all compliance requirements, while also providing a clear roadmap to recovery.

Some types of disasters that organizations can plan for include:

  • Application failure
  • Communication failure (Internet or power outage, etc)
  • Data center disaster
  • Building disaster (earthquake, fire, etc)
  • National disaster

Recovery Plan Considerations

A disaster recovery strategy should start at the business operational level and determine which applications are most important to keep the organization running.   Recovery time objective describes the target amount of time a business application can be down, typically measured in hours, minutes or seconds.

Recovery point objective describes the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to be resumed.

Recovery strategies define an organization’s plans for responding to an incident, while disaster recovery plans describe how the organization should respond. Recovery plans are derived from recovery strategies.

In determining a recovery strategy, organizations should consider such issues as:

  • Insurance coverage
  • Resources — people and physical facilities
  • Management’s position on risks
  • Compliance requirements

Management approval of recovery strategies is necessary. All strategies should align with the organization’s goals. Once disaster recovery strategies have been developed and approved, they can be translated into disaster recovery plans.

Types of disaster recovery plans

Disaster recovery plans can be specifically tailored for a given environment. Some environment-specific plans include:

  • Data center disaster recovery plan:    Data center disaster recovery plan focuses exclusively on the data center facility and infrastructure. A well executed operational risk assessment is a key element in data center disaster recovery plans. It analyzes key components such as building location, power systems and protection, security, and office space. The plan must address a broad range of possible scenarios.
  • Cloud disaster recovery plan:    Cloud disaster recovery can range from a file backup in the cloud to a complete replication of data and information. Cloud disaster recovery can be space, time and cost-efficient, but maintaining the disaster recovery plan requires proper management. Manager must know the location of physical and virtual servers.
  • Virtualized disaster recovery plan:    This process provides opportunities to implement disaster recovery in a more efficient and simpler way. A virtualized environment can spin up new virtual machine instances within minutes and provide application recovery through high availability. Testing can also be easier to achieve, but the plan must include the ability to validate that applications can be run in disaster recovery mode and returned to normal operations within the RPO and RTO.
  • Network disaster recovery plan:    Developing a plan for recovering a network gets more complicated as the complexity of the network increases. It is important to detail the step-by-step recovery procedure, test it properly and keep it updated. Data in this plan will be specific to the network, such as in its performance and networking staff.

The plan must address security, which is a common issue in the cloud that can be alleviated through well executed testing.

Don’t make the mistake of letting them guess what has happened, keep your customers, employees, and vendors informed at all times. Communication is vital in these types of situations.  Not keeping your customers informed may cause them to start looking elsewhere for the type of service you provide. So start planning for the future to assure your business will keep on going no matter the circumstances.

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What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan and Why Is It Important?

Posted by Rick Yvanovich

The recent pandemic is a warning bell for every business. Those who have been living on the edge without a detailed disaster recovery plan struggled to adapt to the unexpected normality where almost all employees have to work remotely .

I. What is a disaster recovery plan? And why is it crucial in the light of the recent pandemic?

1. Disaster recovery vs backups

2. disaster recovery vs business continuity plan, 1. virtualised disaster recovery plan, 2. network disaster recovery, 3. cloud disaster recovery plan, 4. data centre disaster recovery plan.

Sure, a global health crisis is not something the corporate world has to face every day, but cyber thieves, frauds , fires, or power outages are.

Surprisingly, 75 per cent of small businesses 1  do not have a disaster recovery plan in place. 93 per cent of companies that suffer data loss and downtime for 10 or more days will eventually file for bankruptcy within just 12 months.

Is your business prepared to lose in this battle? What is your drill?

What is a disaster recovery plan? And why is it crucial in the light of the recent pandemic?

What is a disaster recovery plan? And why is it crucial in the light of the recent pandemic?

A disaster recovery plan is a strategy set out to help an organisation quickly resume its operation after an unexpected event. A disaster recovery plan is well documented, structured, and regularly reviewed to maintain its viability.

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A disaster recovery plan typically applies to departments that rely on a functioning IT infrastructure and aims at recovering data loss and system dysfunctionalities.

Besides ensuring businesses can operate with minimal interruptions by preparing adequate resources to combat future catastrophes, a disaster recovery plan also helps to:

  • Lessen damages and financial impacts as a result of the disruption
  • Train employees about safety procedures in case of an emergency
  • Describe operational alternatives well in advance
  • Ensure a smooth and rapid restoration process

Read more: What “Transformers” can teach us about enterprise IT security?

It is reported that the number of cyber-attacks surges during crises. And during the recent coronavirus pandemic, WHO claimed the number of attacks directed at its staff increased fivefold 2 , and the number of attacks against banks has surpassed the 238% 3  mark.

During severe natural disasters, there is no guarantee that vendor support can get to the affected sites on time. The lack of human resources and even equipment replacements to repair and maintain the damaged infrastructure can be catastrophic.

Human errors or natural adversities can quickly shut down the entire corporation, leaving it defenceless for hours or even weeks. Thus, businesses that invest in detailed disaster recovery and a business continuity plan can survive and resume their normal operation post disasters much faster.

Disaster recovery vs backups

The term "backup" is pretty much self-explanatory; it is the process of storing copies of your data. Many of us often confused that disaster recovery means data backups. Businesses can't recover without backup files, but they can certainly backup data without having any disaster recovery plan in place.

Read more: Defining the differences between data lake and data warehouse

Mistakenly deleting data happens all the time. In that instance, to restore the lost data, businesses need to have an environment – a virtual storage space where all versions of data reside.

This is where disaster recovery comes in. In short, disaster recovery is a more complex process in which the organisation replicates the entire IT environment (data, systems, networks, and applications) and establishes processes to enable them to restore functionality and data from this replicated environment to the primary one.

The ultimate goal of both processes is to ensure businesses never lose valuable information.

Disaster recovery vs business continuity plan

Disaster recovery is an integral part of a business continuity plan, which also is a documented strategy complete with critical information detailing which systems and processes must be sustained and how to maintain them in case of an unplanned disruption.

A business continuity plan is extremely critical in a time of crisis, particularly during this ongoing pandemic. It is a must-have to ensure a company can identify potential weaknesses and threats and necessary steps to mitigate those risks to avoid low customer satisfaction due to downtime. In other words, having a detailed business continuity plan enables businesses to be proactive .

Read more: The 5 security layers and “defense-in-depth” that Infor uses

Download whitepaper "Cloud security and your enterprise" here

Types of disaster recovery plan

Disaster recovery plans depend largely on the business' current IT infrastructure. Typical plans include:

A cost-effective option for businesses that do not have the budget to set up a physical restoring facility. Virtualisation is the process of creating virtual copies of operating systems, servers, storage depositories, or network resources. In a virtualised environment, the restoration of applications is done through virtual machine instances, which can be created within minutes.

Network failures can put a toll on the business' applications and the entire IT infrastructure. To ensure businesses always have reliable connectivity, a network disaster recovery plan should include a step-by-step procedure on who to contact, how to replace equipment, what actions to take to restore the network.

Cloud disaster recovery is a combination of strategies and services aimed at backing up data or applications via the public cloud or cloud providers. This is also a more cost-effective option. However, businesses need to consider factors such as bandwidth, cloud storage costs, the location of physical and virtual servers, security and compliance before implementation.

This option focuses on the physical data centre . The plan should detail procedures to identify, assess, resolve and mitigate risks that may harm the building location, HVAC systems, physical security, support personnel, and much more. The preparation of the plan requires input from the IT department, facility manager as well as security experts.

Read more: How AWS manages and maintains its massive data centres

Regardless of the type of disaster recovery plans your business chooses to implement, it should start at the business level and focus on mission-critical applications, data as well as systems. The plan should also contain an estimated amount of downtime the organisation is allowed to experience, calculated in hours, minutes, or even seconds.

How a disaster recovery plan can be used to safeguard financial data

Financial data is one of the most valuable assets organisations own. Highly sensitive data is the treasure troves for cybercriminals. When your business possesses a fair amount of financial data, attacks are inevitable.

Imagine if your systems are down by just a couple of hours, attackers can leverage the opportunity to sneak in and wipe down both your employee and client's data. What if your client base spans across the globe? The consequences will be disastrous, which can result in not only economic losses.

Without a proper recovery plan and in time responses, the breach in security can make clients lose trust in you and your services. They would subsequently take their business somewhere else safer, stakeholders would withdraw investments, or the disruption would spread to other businesses within the industry.

All in all, businesses cannot wait until the last minute to implement a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Only when businesses can prepare to face the worst can they be confident in serving the present.

At TRG, we solve business problems, take a consultative approach to every client engagement, and find actionable solutions that will help your organisation achieve the best business outcomes. Talk to us and explore the various Digital Advisory services we have in store for you today!

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References:

1. Veritis, "Disaster Recovery 2019 Statistics – Insights That Shape Your Business Future", Veritis , June 23, 2019, https://www.veritis.com/blog/disaster-recovery-2019-statistics-insights-that-shape-your-business-future/

2. WHO, "WHO reports fivefold increase in cyber attacks, urges vigilance", WHO , April 23, 2020 https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-04-2020-who-reports-fivefold-increase-in-cyber-attacks-urges-vigilance

3. Osborne, Charlie, "COVID-19 blamed for 238% surge in cyberattacks against banks", ZDNet , May 14, 2020, https://www.zdnet.com/article/covid-19-blamed-for-238-surge-in-cyberattacks-against-banks/

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5 Reasons Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

IT-technician

IT failure is an if, not when question

Do you need a disaster recovery plan for your business? The answer is yes. This article will run down the 5 main reason the answer to that question is simple.  

Disaster recovery (DR) can take a low priority. Finding the dedicated funds to implement an appropriate disaster recovery plan can be a daunting task, especially given that it has little return on investment regarding direct income or cost savings.

Research has found that 20% of companies have no plan in place and only 10% of businesses with no disaster recovery plan survive a major failure. This can be catastrophic for businesses, with many companies unable to survive. In fact, 60% of small businesses that lose data close within 6 months.

However, having a disaster recovery plan in place can pay off — 96% of businesses that do have a disaster recovery solution in place fully recover operations. 

Investing in a disaster recovery solution can save your entire business in the event of a disaster. Like cybersecurity, it is a necessary requirement of operating in a digital age. The costs should be calculated into the savings and efficiencies gained from digital transformation, and with cloud disaster recovery software making it easier than ever to set up and manage, there’s no better time. Doing so opens up opportunities based on the security and safety of your data.

This article is a look at the 5 main threats that make disaster recovery a must for any business.

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The 5 Reasons You Need A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

Technical failures, cybercrime, human error, terrorism, natural disasters..

Malware infections can corrupt or destroy files, some will even purposefully attempt to wipe mainframes. You need to take cybersecurity seriously, but be prepared for a breach and total system failure.

2017 was a dangerous year. Global ransomware attacks brought giants such as FedEx, Nissan, Merck, and the NHS temporarily to their knees. Ransomware attacks are expected to rise by nearly 12% this year. However, 96% of companies with reliable disaster recovery protocols fully recover from an attack.

Natural Disasters

People don’t always think about Nature when they consider threats to their IT infrastructure — but, they should. There has been a steady increase in economic losses from natural disasters since the 1970s. 2017 saw 16 events in the US alone that cost more than $1 billion.

Those damages encompassed more than data loss. However, securing your business from natural disasters is an important thing to consider. Think about your location, its proximity to floodplains, fault lines and other local dangers. Take this into account when constructing your disaster recovery plan. Backing-up to a data centre across the street won’t help you in the event of a flood.

Similarly to natural disasters, your location may expose you to physical threats that could damage your ability to safely store data. Terrorism has cost the global economy more than $20 billion every year for the last 10 years — hitting a high of $104 billion in 2014*.

Depending on your business, this could mean preparing for an attack itself. More likely, however, this means thinking about power disruptions and infrastructure damage similar to a natural disaster.

Hardware Failure

Hardware faults were responsible for 45% of unplanned downtime in 2017. Power outages accounted for another 35%. That means that 80% of failures were caused by things as mundane as network issues, faulty drivers or routine infrastructure failures.

It is important to remain on top of hardware refurbishments. However, these issues encompass a number of problems over which no business has control. Nothing can replace the ability to sidestep a failure with the near-instant Restore Time Objective (RTO) capabilities offered by a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

Human Error

Beyond every other consideration, it is prudent to have an IT recovery plan simply because people make mistakes. Failure to appropriately save a document, or saving over important information can cause small to critical problems for a business. Although common, these kinds of mistakes are nearly impossible to prevent — at least while humans are still involved in work.

A disaster recovery plan that involves regular backups will create a series of restore points that can, if accessed correctly, enable teams to operate more effectively in the event of a human error — in addition to securing your data and business applications in the event of a larger disaster.  

  • Think about your location and the specific nature of natural and man-made disasters to which you are exposed
  • Cybercrime and ransomware are a growing threat that can be mitigated by robust disaster recovery measures
  • Take into account human error and the benefits of continuous backup
  • Consider the risks of mundane power failures and network hiccups

Protect you business now and always, get your quote today >>

The Costs of Failure: What Lacking a Disaster Recovery Plan Can Mean for Your Business

In 2016, companies spent a minimum of $926 per minute of unplanned downtime*. That rose to a potential $17,244 per minute and a total average cost of $740,357 for data centre failures.

In addition to direct costs and loss of revenue, 25% of businesses that suffered a failure reported staff disruptions that impacted business because of the need to refocus employee time to deal with the disaster.

Most importantly, it is impossible to quantify the damage to your brand that can occur in the event of data loss or significant downtime. Customers rarely forgive such transgressions. Even failure to provide adequate online customer service in a moment of need can destroy a valued relationship because of the always-on expectations of digital commerce.

You need to do everything you can to reduce downtime and prevent outages. Organisations lose anything from nothing to millions. 90% of business with no disaster recovery plan close after a major failure. 60% of small businesses that lose data will close within 6 months*.

  • Downtime is expensive
  • Loss of data and loss of productivity add to those costs
  • It is impossible to quantify the damage to your brand that can occur due to an unmitigated IT failure
  • Only 10% of businesses with no disaster recovery plan survive a major failure

Summary: Don’t gamble with your brand — neglecting a disaster recovery plan for your business isn’t worth the risk

A disaster recovery plan is not just about protecting data, processes and applications. It is about retaining customer confidence, preventing losses in productivity and missed business opportunities. It is about protecting your brand.

Customers have come to expect digital perfection. IT failure can create reputational damage that is greater than the costs of ‘technical’ recovery. Customer acquisition can be expensive — re-acquisition is next to impossible. Think about how you would react if a business you used lost personal data or failed to deliver needed services at a critical moment.  

Neglecting a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is not a risk worth taking to avoid the limited costs of being prepared. Ultimately, the ability to operate online from remote servers has enabled firms to have full and immediate redundancy of all their processes, data and applications. Failure to take advantage of this opportunity is nearly as negligent as a failure to maintain a web-presence or utilise the flows of digital data that make using such a backup system a necessity. It is not worth gambling your brand, business and reputation to save a little bit of money. The risks are too high.

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* The Global Economic Impact Of Terrorism [Infographic] * Business Continuity Statistics For IT Pros – StorageCraft * 58 Percent of Small Businesses Not Prepared for Data Loss (INFOGRAPHIC)

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Why Disaster Recovery Planning is Important

Disaster recovery planning is crucial to safe business operations but is usually the first thing cut when the budget gets tight. While working with our customers we always ask about their disaster recovery plan, and we usually hear “we have that in the works” or “that is something we will work on in the future after we get through our top IT priorities.” However, a disaster recovery plan that is “in the works” does not help a business when a disaster happens.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

it business man in network server room have problems and looking for  disaster situation  solution

What would be considered a disaster?

We have noticed that a lot of businesses do not have or update their disaster recovery plan because they do not live in a region where natural disasters frequently occur. However, there are a multitude of events that we consider a disaster when it comes to business- especially with our reliance on technology:

  • Application Failure
  • Communication Failure
  • Data Center Disaster
  • Building Disaster
  • Campus Disaster
  • Citywide Disaster
  • Regional Disaster
  • National Disaster
  • Multinational Disaster

Many things can cause the items listed above to happen, some of them natural and some of them due to human error. It is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place so that when an unforeseen event such as a fire, a cybersecurity breach, or employee error occurs everyone knows what steps to take to prevent prolonged downtime. In some cases, a natural disaster may wipe out an entire physical space, but with the proper plan in place, all business data can be recovered allowing business to pick up again.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

When the COVID-19 global pandemic happened, many businesses around the world experienced a form of disaster. The shift from in-person to remote work was a huge shock that many were not prepared for. The ability to support remote work requires the proper applications, data center components and communication platforms. Businesses who had not planned for business functions to exists solely over the internet were left scrambling to set up VPNs or cloud-based storage, methods of voice communication, and new applications allowing employees to conduct meetings or locate business files.

As we have mentioned before, quick fixes or installs often result in long term problems down the road. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many businesses moved as quickly as possible to implement new tools and hired 3 rd party partners to enable them to keep operating. This created an environment for potential cybersecurity threats and hacking as well as employees being undertrained on using new tools. When new applications, platforms, and hardware are not fully researched or vetted initially, there is a domino effect of issues that can arise later. While no one could have foreseen a global pandemic shutting down business, disaster recovery planning helped many businesses navigate the stressful time a little easier.

What if I do not know how to create a disaster recovery plan?

You are not alone if you do not know where to start on a disaster recovery plan. That is why there are providers who offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRASS). These provides can work with you to determine what you need to be planning for and what the biggest threats to your business could be. In general, a DRASS provider will help you with the following:

  • Insurance Coverage
  • Resources (people and physical facilities)
  • Compliance Requirements (HIPAA for example)

Disaster recovery planning is very customizable and will look different for each business, but it is very important to have a plan in place. In some cases, a disaster recovery plan can save a business from going under after a catastrophic event.

If you have questions about Disaster Recovery Planning or DRASS, reach out to us at [email protected] or call 763-475-5500

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12-27-21 | Blog Post

Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

You wouldn’t buy a car without buying insurance, so why would you have a business without a disaster recovery plan? Disaster Recovery is a crucial part of every company’s IT strategy, and without it you open yourself up to the potential of catastrophic data loss. If that isnt enough of a reason to ensure your company has a plan in place, here are a few more:

Threats are Real

Threats to your business’s data come in all shapes and sizes. From natural disasters to human error to cyber criminals.  Today,  Ransomware  is a top cyber threat that is wreaking havoc on IT systems. Preventative measures can only go so far when a disaster actually strikes, and companies should have plans in place to get their systems back online quickly.

The Cost of Downtime

Downtime  can happen to any business, at any time, for any reason. For many companies, downtime means lost revenue. But the cost of downtime spans beyond monetary. Downtime can cost your business damage to its reputation and, as a result, loss of customers. In some cases, downtime can be life or death, like when a hospital experienced an extended outage of its Electronic Health Record.  The longer you are offline, the more damage your company will experience. Having a disaster recovery plan in place helps businesses to outline parameters for getting back online while reducing the overall impact of downtime. This can include having a failover plan to get up and running through a secondary site.

Data Security

The backbone of most companies is the data that they generate, collect and store. Thus, protecting this data should be a top priority. Having a disaster recovery plan in place helps businesses to avoid catastrophic data loss. By outlining strict regiments for the backup and recovery of data, a disaster recovery plan ensures that your data isn’t only safe from an attack or outage, it is handled securely.

Human Error

Disasters are not always natural or cyber related. Often times downtime can be caused by something as simple as human error. And while we can’t eradicate  human error  entirely, we can take steps to reduce it and ensure that recovery time is fast. By deploying a disaster recovery plan, companies can make sure that employees are all on the same page when it comes to handling a disaster. This can also help in mitigating the risk of a human error disaster from occurring.

The Bottom Line

Though we try our best to prepare and prevent the worst from happening, there are things that are out of our control. The best course of action is to have a plan in place to reduce the impact of a disaster on your business. Companies that do not have a disaster recovery plan in place often will never recover from the costs of downtime. Don’t put your business in that position. Find out more about how you can develop a DR plan.

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Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are risk management strategies that businesses rely on to prepare for unexpected incidents. While the terms are closely related, there are some key differences worth considering when choosing which is right for you:

  • Business continuity plan (BCP): A BCP is a detailed plan that outlines the steps an organization will take to return to normal business functions in the event of a disaster. Where other types of plans might focus on one specific aspect of recovery and interruption prevention (such as a natural disaster or cyberattack), BCPs take a broad approach and aim to ensure an organization can face as broad a range of threats as possible.
  • Disaster recovery plan (DRP):  More detailed in nature than BCPs, disaster recovery plans consist of contingency plans for how enterprises will specifically protect their IT systems and critical data during an interruption. Alongside BCPs, DR plans help businesses protect data and IT systems from many different disaster scenarios, such as massive outages, natural disasters,  ransomware  and  malware  attacks, and many others.
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR): Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) can be approached together or separately depending on business needs. Recently, more and more businesses are moving towards practicing the two disciplines together, asking executives to collaborate on BC and DR practices rather than work in isolation. This has led to combining the two terms into one, BCDR , but the essential meaning of the two practices remains unchanged.

Regardless of how you choose to approach the development of BCDR at your organization, it’s worth noting how quickly the field is growing worldwide. As the results of bad BCDR like data loss and downtime become more and more expensive, many enterprises are adding to their existing investments. Last year, companies worldwide were poised to spend USD 219 billion on cybersecurity and solutions, a 12% increase from the year before according to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) (link resides outside ibm.com).

Why are business continuity and disaster recovery plans important?

Business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs) help organizations prepare for a broad range of unplanned incidents. When deployed effectively, a good DR plan can help stakeholders better understand the risks to regular business functions that a particular threat may pose. Enterprises that don’t invest in business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) are more likely to experience data loss, downtime, financial penalties and reputational damage due to unplanned incidents.

Here are some of the benefits that businesses who invest in business continuity and disaster recovery plans can expect:

  • Shortened downtime: When a disaster shuts down normal business operations, it can cost enterprises hundreds of millions of dollars to get back up and running again. High-profile  cyberattacks  are particularly damaging, frequently attracting unwanted attention and causing investors and customers to flee to competitors who advertise shorter downtimes. Implementing a strong BCDR plan can shorten your recovery timeframe regardless of the kind of disaster you face.
  • Lower financial risk: According to  IBM’s recent Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach was USD 4.45 million in 2023—a 15% increase since 2020. Enterprises with strong business continuity plans have shown they can reduce those costs significantly by shortening downtimes and increasing customer and investor confidence.
  • Reduced penalties: Data breaches can result in large penalties when private customer information is leaked. Businesses that operate in the healthcare and personal finance space are at a higher risk because of the sensitivity of the data they handle. Having a strong business continuity strategy in place is imperative for businesses that operate in these sectors, helping keep the risk of heavy financial penalties relatively low.

How to build a business continuity disaster recovery plan

Business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) planning is most effective when businesses take a separate but coordinated approach. While business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are similar, there are important differences that make developing them separately advantageous:

  • Strong BCPs focus on tactics for keeping normal operations running before, during and immediately following a disaster. 
  • DRPs tend to be more reactive, outlining ways to respond an incident and get everything back up and running smoothly.

Before we dive into how you can build effective BCPs and DRPs, let’s look at a couple of terms that are relevant to both:

  • Recovery time objective (RTO):  RTO refers to the amount of time it takes to restore business processes after an unplanned incident. Establishing a reasonable RTO is one of the first things businesses need to do when they’re creating either a BCP or DRP. 
  • Recovery point objective (RPO):  Your business’ recovery point objective (RPO) is the amount of data it can afford to lose in a disaster and still recover. Since data protection is a core capability of many modern enterprises, some constantly copy data to a remote  data center  to ensure continuity in case of a massive breach. Others set a tolerable RPO of a few minutes (or even hours) for business data to be recovered from a backup system and know they will be able to recover from whatever was lost during that time.

How to build a business continuity plan (BCP) 

While each business will have slightly different requirements when it comes to planning for business continuity, there are four widely used steps that yield strong results regardless of size or industry.

1. Run a business impact analysis 

Business impact analysis (BIA) helps organizations better understand the various threats they face. Strong BIA includes creating robust descriptions of all potential threats and any vulnerabilities they might expose. Also, the BIA estimates the likelihood of each event so the organization can prioritize them accordingly.

2. Create potential responses

For each threat you identify in your BIA, you’ll need to develop a response for your business. Different threats require different strategies, so for each disaster you might face it’s good to create a detailed plan for how you could potentially recover.

3. Assign roles and responsibilities

The next step is to figure out what’s required of everyone on your disaster recovery team in the event of a disaster. This step must document expectations and consider how individuals will communicate during an unplanned incident. Remember, many threats shut down key communication capabilities like cellular and Wi-Fi networks, so it’s wise to have communication fallback procedures you can rely on.

4. Rehearse and revise your plan

For each threat you’ve prepared for, you’ll need to constantly practice and refine BCDR plans until they are operating smoothly. Rehearse as realistic a scenario as you can without putting anyone at actual risk so team members can build confidence and discover how they are likely to perform in the event of an interruption to business continuity.

How to build a disaster recovery plan (DRP)

Like BCPs, DRPs identify key roles and responsibilities and must be constantly tested and refined to be effective. Here is a widely used four-step process for creating DRPs.

1. Run a business impact analysis

Like your BCP, your DRP begins with a careful assessment of each threat your company could face and what its implications could be. Consider the damage each potential threat could cause and the likelihood of it interrupting your daily business operations. Additional considerations could include loss of revenue, downtime, cost of reputational repair (public relations) and loss of customers and investors due to bad press.

2. Inventory your assets

Effective DRPs require you to know exactly what your enterprise owns. Regularly perform these inventories so you can easily identify hardware, software, IT infrastructure and anything else your organization relies on for critical business functions. You can use the following labels to categorize each asset and prioritize its protection—critical, important and unimportant.

  • Critical:  Label assets critical if you depend on them for your normal business operations.
  • Important:  Give this label to anything you use at least once a day and, if disrupted, would impact your critical operations (but not shut them down entirely).
  • Unimportant:  These are the assets your business owns but uses infrequently enough to make them unessential for normal operations.

Like in your BCP, you’ll need to describe responsibilities and ensure your team members have what they need to perform them. Here are some widely used roles and responsibilities to consider:

  • Incident reporter:  Someone who maintains contact information for relevant parties and communicates with business leaders and stakeholders when disruptive events occur.
  • DRP  supervisor:  Someone who ensures team members perform the tasks they’ve been assigned during an incident. 
  • Asset manager:  Someone whose job it is to secure and protect critical assets when a disaster strikes. 

4. Rehearse your plan

Just like with your BCP, you’ll need to constantly practice and update your DRP for it to be effective. Practice regularly and update your documents according to any meaningful changes that need to be made. For example, if your company acquires a new asset after your DRP has been formed, you’ll need to incorporate it into your plan going forward or it won’t be protected when disaster strikes.

Examples of strong business continuity and disaster recovery plans

Whether you need a business continuity plan (BCP), a disaster recovery plan (DRP), or both working together or separately, it can help to look at how other businesses have put plans in place to boost their preparedness. Here are a few examples of plans that have helped businesses with both BC and DR preparation.

  • Crisis management plan:  A good crisis management plan could be part of either business continuity or disaster recovery planning. Crisis management plans are detailed documents that outline how you’ll manage a specific threat. They provide detailed instructions on how an organization will respond to a specific kind of crisis, such as a power outage, cybercrime or natural disaster; specifically, how they’ll deal with the hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute pressures while the event is unfolding. Many of the steps, roles and responsibilities required in business continuity and disaster recovery planning are relevant to good crisis management plans.
  • Communications plan:  Communications plans (or comms plans) equally apply to business continuity and disaster recovery efforts. They outline how your organization will specifically address PR concerns during an unplanned incident. To build a good comms plan, business leaders typically coordinate with communications specialists to formulate their communications plans. Some have specific plans in place for disasters that are deemed both likely and severe , so they know exactly how they’ll respond.
  • Network recovery plan:  Network recovery plans help organizations recover interruptions of network services, including internet access, cellular data, local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Network recovery plans are typically broad in scope since they focus on a basic and essential need—communication—and should be considered more on the side of business continuity than disaster recovery. Given the importance of many networked services to business operations, network recovery plans focus on the steps needed to restore services quickly and effectively after an interruption.
  • Data center  recovery plan: A data center recovery plan is more likely to be included in a BCP than a DRP because of its focus on data security and threats to IT infrastructure. Some common threats to data backup include overstretched personnel, cyberattacks, power outages and difficulty following compliance requirements. 
  • Virtualized recovery plan:  Like a data center plan, a virtualized recovery plan is more likely to be part of a BCP than a DRP because of a BCP’s focus on IT and data resources. Virtualized recovery plans rely on  virtual machine (VM)  instances that can swing into operation within a couple of minutes of an interruption. Virtual machines are representations/emulations of physical computers that provide critical application recovery through high availability (HA), or the ability of a system to operate continuously without failing.

Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions 

Even a minor interruption can put your business at risk. IBM has a wide range of contingency plans and disaster recovery solutions to help prepare your business to face a variety of threats including cloud backup and disaster recovery capabilities and security and resiliency services.

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Why is business continuity and disaster recovery plan important?

Mitigating disruption: The importance of business continuity and disaster recovery plans

  • July 13, 2023

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face numerous challenges that can disrupt their operations and threaten their survival. From natural disasters and cyber attacks to system failures and supply chain disruptions, businesses must be prepared to navigate these uncertainties. 

An organization can mitigate risks by maintaining a risk register and following an IT risk management process. However, it cannot dissolve all the uncertainties in business operations.

This is where the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery plans comes into play. 

Understanding business disruptions

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Business disruptions can occur in various forms and have the potential to significantly impact organizations. By expanding on different types of disruptions, we can deepen our understanding of their implications and highlight the importance of preparedness.

1. Natural disasters

  • Severe weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and other weather-related disasters
  • Geological events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides

2. Cyber attacks

  • Data loss and financial losses due to cyber attacks such as malware and ransomware
  • Social engineering attacks such as phishing, vishing, and spear phishing
  • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on websites and applications

3. System failures and IT disruptions

  • Hardware and software failures like software glitches, compatibility issues, downtime, data loss, and customer dissatisfaction due to hardware failure

4. Data center outages 

  • Data center failures, including the loss of critical systems, prolonged downtime, and compromised data integrity

5. Supply chain disruptions

  • Consequences of supplier bankruptcy or sudden closure of business operations

6. Regulatory and compliance changes

  • New legislation or regulations: Changes in laws and regulations can create challenges for organizations to adapt and comply. The potential consequences of non-compliance include fines, legal action, and reputational damage

7. Manually caused factors

  • Disruptions like labor strikes, employee shortages, or key personnel departures on business continuity and operations
  • Human mistakes, negligence, or intentional actions can result in system failures, data breaches, or operational disruptions

By expanding on these business disruptions, organizations can better understand the potential risks they face and the need for robust business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Taking proactive measures to mitigate these risks ensures organizational resilience and the ability to navigate disruptions with minimal impact.

What is a business continuity plan? 

Business continuity planning is the process of developing and implementing procedures to ensure that a business can continue to operate in the event of a disaster. This could include a natural disaster, a cyber-attack, or a power outage.

What is a disaster recovery plan?

Disaster recovery planning refers to the process of creating and implementing strategies, procedures, and measures to recover and restore critical systems, data, and infrastructure in the event of a disaster or significant disruption. It involves analyzing potential risks, defining recovery objectives, and developing detailed plans and procedures to enable the timely recovery of IT systems and minimize the impact on business operations. The goal of disaster recovery planning is to ensure that the organization can resume critical functions within a reasonable timeframe and minimize data loss.

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Disaster recovery planning (DRP) is a subset of business continuity planning (BCP) that specifically focuses on the recovery and restoration of critical systems, data, and infrastructure following a disruptive event. While BCP encompasses a broader scope of activities to ensure the overall continuity of business operations, DRP specifically addresses the technical aspects of recovering IT systems and assets. 

What is the role of business continuity and data recovery plans?

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

The role of a business continuity plan and data recovery (BCPDR) plan is to ensure the resilience and continuity of an organization’s critical operations during and after a disruptive event. The BCPDR plays a crucial role in minimizing the impact of disruptions, maintaining essential services, and enabling a swift recovery. Here are some key roles of a business continuity and disaster recovery plan:

1. Risk identification and assessment

The BCPDR helps identify potential risks and vulnerabilities that could disrupt business operations. It involves conducting a comprehensive risk assessment to understand the likelihood and potential impact of various threats. This step allows organizations to prioritize their planning efforts and allocate resources effectively.

2. Prevention and mitigation

Business continuity planning involves implementing preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of disruptions and mitigate their potential impact. This can include measures such as redundancy planning, implementing robust security protocols, regular maintenance of critical systems, and implementing backup solutions.

A data recovery plan helps mitigate the impact of data loss by implementing preventive measures such as regular backups, and data redundancy and integrity checks. These measures help ensure that sensitive information is protected and available for recovery in case of accidental deletion, hardware failure, cyber-attacks, or other data loss events.

3. Incident response and emergency management

A crucial role of the BCPDR is to outline the procedures and protocols for effectively responding to incidents and managing emergencies. It defines roles and responsibilities, establishes communication channels, and provides guidance on activating emergency response teams. This ensures a coordinated and structured response, minimizing confusion and enabling timely decision-making.

4. Business resumption and recovery

The BCP outlines strategies and procedures for resuming critical business functions and recovering from disruptions. This includes defining recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) to guide the restoration of systems, processes, and data. It also includes strategies for relocating operations, sourcing alternative suppliers, and restoring customer services.

5. Communication and stakeholder engagement

During a disruption, effective communication is crucial. The business continuity plan includes communication plans to ensure timely and accurate information sharing with employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. It provides guidelines for internal and external communication channels, key messages, and designated spokespersons, ensuring transparency and building trust.

6. Testing, training, and exercising

Regular testing, training, and exercising of the BCP are vital to evaluate its effectiveness and ensure preparedness. This includes conducting mock drills, tabletop exercises, and simulations to validate the plan’s functionality, identify gaps, and train personnel on their roles and responsibilities. Feedback and lessons learned from these activities inform plan enhancements and continuous improvement.

7. Compliance and regulatory requirements

The BCP helps organizations meet compliance and regulatory obligations. It ensures that the organization’s operations align with industry standards, legal requirements, and contractual obligations. By demonstrating a robust BCP, organizations can instill confidence in stakeholders, regulators, and customers regarding their ability to handle disruptions effectively.

By fulfilling these roles, a business continuity and data recovery plan provides organizations with a roadmap to navigate disruptions, minimize downtime, protect critical assets, maintain customer trust, and ensure the continuity of essential operations. It is a proactive approach that enables organizations to respond effectively to disruptions, safeguard their reputation, and swiftly recover from adverse events.

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Benefits of business continuity and disaster recovery plans

why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans offer numerous benefits to organizations. These plans help mitigate the impact of disruptions, minimize downtime, and ensure the continuity of essential operations. Here are some key benefits of implementing business continuity and disaster recovery plans:

1. Minimize downtime and financial loss

By having a well-defined plan in place, organizations can minimize downtime and the associated financial losses caused by disruptions. The ability to quickly recover and resume operations reduces the impact on revenue, customer service, and productivity, safeguarding the organization’s financial stability.

2. Maintain customer trust and reputation

Effective business continuity and disaster recovery plans demonstrate an organization’s commitment to serving its customers even in challenging circumstances. By minimizing disruptions and providing uninterrupted services, organizations maintain customer trust and preserve their reputation.

3. Regulatory compliance

Many industries have regulatory requirements mandating the implementation of business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Adhering to these regulations helps organizations avoid penalties, legal issues, and reputational damage. It also ensures that critical systems and data are adequately protected.

4. Enhanced organizational resilience

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans build resilience within an organization. They promote a proactive approach to risk management, enabling organizations to identify vulnerabilities, implement preventive measures, and effectively respond to disruptions. This resilience helps organizations withstand challenges and adapt to changing circumstances.

5. Safeguard critical data and systems

Data is a valuable asset for organizations, and business continuity and disaster recovery plans help safeguard this data. Through regular backups, redundant systems, and recovery strategies, these plans ensure the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of critical information. This protects organizations from data loss, breaches, and other cybersecurity incidents.

6. Effective risk management

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans enable organizations to identify and assess risks comprehensively. By analyzing potential threats and vulnerabilities, organizations can develop strategies to mitigate and manage those risks effectively. This proactive approach to risk management enhances overall organizational resilience.

7. Employee safety and well-being

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans prioritize employee safety and well-being. These plans outline protocols and procedures to ensure the safety of employees during disruptive events. By providing clear guidance, organizations can effectively manage employee evacuation, communication, and support during crises.

8. Stakeholder confidence

The implementation of business continuity and disaster recovery plans instills confidence in stakeholders, including customers, partners, suppliers, and investors. These plans demonstrate that an organization is prepared to handle disruptions, maintain operations, and fulfill its commitments. This confidence strengthens relationships and fosters long-term partnerships.

9. Continuous improvement

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are not static documents. Regular testing, training, and reviews help identify areas for improvement and allow organizations to enhance their preparedness over time. The iterative nature of these plans ensures that they remain up-to-date and effective in the face of evolving risks and challenges.

By realizing these benefits, organizations can effectively navigate disruptions, protect their interests, and maintain their ability to serve customers and stakeholders. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are vital tools for building resilience and ensuring the long-term success of an organization.

Final words

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential for organizations to navigate disruptions effectively. They mitigate downtime, safeguard critical assets, maintain customer trust, ensure regulatory compliance, and enhance organizational resilience. 

By proactively preparing for risks, organizations can protect their interests and maintain their ability to serve customers and stakeholders. Embracing these plans is crucial for long-term success in today’s unpredictable business landscape.

Scrut experts can help you in developing and implementing a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. You can connect with our experts by clicking here . 

A disaster recovery plan is a set of predefined processes and protocols designed to recover and restore IT systems, data, and infrastructure after a disaster or significant disruption, ensuring business continuity.

The role of a disaster recovery plan is to enable the organization to recover and restore critical systems and data, minimizing the impact of a disruption on business operations, customer service, and productivity.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans offer several benefits, including minimizing downtime and financial loss, maintaining customer trust and reputation, ensuring regulatory compliance, enhancing organizational resilience, safeguarding critical data and systems, enabling effective risk management, promoting employee safety and well-being, instilling stakeholders’ confidence, and fostering continuous improvement.

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why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: Key Differences

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery, what are the key differences? This article reviews differences in priorities, timing, scope, and how these two plans overlap.

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he upheaval of the past few years has illustrated how important it is for businesses to prepare for all types of unexpected events. Natural disasters, public health emergencies, and malware can all potentially interrupt your business operations. While you can’t always prevent these types of disruptions, you can minimize their impact by developing strategic plans to keep your core business functions going even under adverse circumstances.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are terms that people often use interchangeably when discussing preparedness. However—while there is an overlap between the two ideas—each one addresses different aspects of handling business disruptions. This guide outlines the similarities and differences in business continuity vs. disaster recovery so you can develop a plan for both.

What is business continuity?

A business continuity plan outlines how you can keep your business running during a disaster or disruption. It’s not a plan to fix the underlying cause; instead, it’s focused on staying open so you can continue serving customers and generating revenue .

The pandemic disrupted business on a massive scale. Businesses that adjusted quickly were able to pivot and come out on the other side more resilient and profitable . Milwaukee Food and Tours temporarily changed its business model from offering in-person tours to delivering customized gift baskets, for example. Innovative Fitness made the shift from offering personal training in gyms to online sessions that focused on working out at home.

What is disaster recovery?

A disaster recovery plan outlines how you can identify and fix the source of the emergency. In some cases, such as a pandemic or hurricane, you can’t address the underlying cause alone. In others, such as a bug in your codebase, your internal team can fix it. Either way, you should have a plan in place to deal with elements that are within your control.

Cyberattacks are the most likely type of disaster modern businesses will face. Although you can and should take steps to protect your IT systems and data, even large corporations with almost-unlimited resources such as Microsoft experience cyberattacks. A business disaster recovery plan will help you mitigate the damage from all types of disasters, regardless of what caused them.

Key differences between business continuity and disaster recovery

It’s easy to mix up business continuity and disaster recovery plans because they’re both implemented in the event of a business catastrophe. However, understanding the differences between them will help you create more effective plans.

A business continuity plan prioritizes staying open for business and minimizing the impact of the disaster on daily business operations. A disaster recovery plan prioritizes dealing with the disaster itself and getting your systems back to their baseline as soon as possible.

A business continuity plan goes into effect as soon as you realize your business is going to be affected by a critical event. Your continuity plan comes first. The disaster recovery plan will come later, usually after the emergency has passed.

Business continuity is broader in scope than disaster recovery. It includes all factors that contribute to running your business, from back-end components such as your supply chain to front-end considerations such as staffing. A disaster recovery plan is more narrowly focused on restoring the elements that were damaged, such as your data and IT systems.

How a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan overlap

Despite their differences, there are also many ways that continuity and disaster recovery plans overlap. Understanding how they overlap can help you save time when you’re creating them. A business continuity plan should include your disaster recovery plan since it’s a comprehensive plan for responding to all aspects of business disruption.

Both plans require proactive risk analysis to identify potential threats and how they'll impact your business operations. You’ll also need to detail roles, policies, and procedures for both. Once you’ve implemented your plans, they need to be regularly evaluated and tested.

What to include in a business continuity plan

Your business continuity plan will be unique to the needs of your business. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. However, there are some elements that should be included in every business continuity plan .

Administrative details

The first part of your plan should include the purpose and objective of your plan as well as a detailed breakdown of your timeline and budget.

The governance section includes the names, roles, and contact information for everyone on the business continuity team. Outline who is responsible for what and whom each team member is accountable to.

Risk analysis and impact

This section will require research into the types of disasters that may occur in your industry or geographic location. While you’ll want to flesh out more common crises such as a cyberattack or banking fraud , you should also think about how rare events, such as a pandemic, could affect your business. Consider how each one could interfere with business operations, including what areas will be impacted.

Preventive and responsive strategies and procedures

Building on your risk analysis, you’ll be able to determine what your preventive and responsive strategies should be. Simply being aware of the possibilities may help you implement strategies that can prevent some types of disasters. For example, nearly 73% of small businesses in the U.S. have experienced a cyberattack. Cybersecurity awareness training can help your staff avoid falling for the most common types of cyberattacks and head off a catastrophe.

However, there’s no way to prevent all disasters, so you need to include detailed procedures for responding to and recovering from crises when they do occur.

Training and testing

Include a section that covers how you’ll train your staff and test your plan. Training plans should be tailored to each role. Your response team will need more detailed training, but everyone should receive basic disaster preparedness training.

Your plan should also include testing scenarios, from tabletop exercises to full-scale drills. As part of your testing procedures, evaluate your response and incorporate your insights into your plan.

What to include in a disaster recovery plan

Your disaster recovery plan is part of the responsive procedures included in your business continuity plan. It should be focused on identifying what elements of your business—particularly IT resources—will need to be restored in the event of a crisis and the procedures for doing so. It should include the following elements:

  • A comprehensive list of all your IT assets, including data backups
  • Your top-priority resources that need to be restored first
  • Procedures for restoring critical systems
  • Backup plans and procedures
  • Training and testing plans

Planning for how your business will deal with unexpected emergencies can help you recover quickly and stay in business longer. Hopefully, you’ll never need to use your plans, but in today’s turbulent business landscape, it’s better to be prepared. One critical aspect of emergency planning is having backups for all of your critical data.

Using Novo’s cloud-based business banking solution means you’ll always have access to your important financial information no matter what happens. Sign up today to get started.

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Novo Platform Inc. strives to provide accurate information but cannot guarantee that this content is correct, complete, or up-to-date. This page is for informational purposes only and is not financial or legal advice nor an endorsement of any third-party products or services. All products and services are presented without warranty. Novo Platform Inc. does not provide any financial or legal advice, and you should consult your own financial, legal, or tax advisors.

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For the latest incoming storm projections, see : National Weather Service Forecast

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR HOMEOWNERS, RENTERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS:

If you suffered damages from the February rainstorm, please fill out this damage assessment survey hosted by LA County.   Completing this online survey will help LA County collect information on estimated business- or home-owner repair costs from early February storm damage. The data will be used to determine if cumulative damages are enough to qualify our area for state- or federally-funded disaster assistance. This form does not guarantee eligibility and is not an application for assistance. However, it is the County's first requested step. Completion of this survey does not guarantee a disaster declaration will be received or that County residents will be eligible to receive assistance. 

LA City residents are encouraged to connect with MyLA311 if they require assistance.

Nongovernmental Recovery Services 

NOTE: The details herein about disaster service providers is for general informational purposes only. It is offered in good faith; however, the City of Los Angeles ("City") makes no representation, promise or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of the contents herein. All references are for the convenience of the public and do not constitute an endorsement or recommendation. The City is not responsible or liable for any loss or damage incurred as a result of the use of or reliance on the services provided by organizations not a part of the City.

American Red Cross

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the Red Cross helps to meet the urgent needs of those affected and focuses on providing safe shelter, food, emotional support, first aid, and health services. 

The Red Cross also plays a critical role in helping families and communities recover in the weeks and months after a disaster. To help communities recover, the Red Cross often brings groups and agencies together to plan recovery activities.

Residents affected by this month's rain event and in need of Red Cross disaster assistance can visit RedCross.org/Get-Help .

City Response

Mud and Debris Flow

City agencies are responding to reports of mudslides and debris flows particularly along canyon roads and hillsides.

Building and Safety Inspectors are assessing homes near the affected areas, and the Bureau of Engineering team has assessed the need for restoration of slope stability and has already begun to reconstruct the affected hillsides.

Department of Transportation Traffic Officers have been deployed to support multiple closures and direct drivers away from impacted areas. As recovery work continues, drivers are advised to avoid canyon roads which may be subject to sudden and intermittent closures as city crews work on assessment and repairs.

Heavy winds and rain caused multiple power outages across Los Angeles. Thanks to the work of LADWP crews, more than 100,000 households have had their power restored since the start of the storm. Angelenos can report outages at LADWP.com/Outages .

Stormwater Capture

In collaboration with LA County Flood Control and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, preliminary estimates show that more than 7 billion gallons of stormwater have been captured in Los Angeles alone since the beginning of Sunday’s storm event.

Shelter Response During The Storm

With the alert of severe weather in the forecast for our region, Los Angeles established a coordinated approach in partnership with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to outreach and connect with unhoused Angelenos across the City. Targeted outreach was done in the waterways and high flooding areas, including in the L.A. River and Sepulveda Basin. We secured hundreds of hotel vouchers and opened additional recreation and park shelters to keep unhoused Angelenos safe and dry with access to supportive services.

The work doesn’t stop there, we are shifting the way we recover by including a plan after the storm with the goal of connecting unhoused Angelenos in a shelter with ongoing services and interim housing options. Visit  Ready.LACity.gov to learn how you can plan for any emergency and create an emergency kit for any disaster. 

Frequently Asked Questions After The Storm

Angelenos can report damage to 311. The Department of Building and Safety has been activated to go out and assess reports of damage.

If my house has damages, where can I receive assistance now?

Angelenos are recommended to contact their insurance company and document their damage. Document every loss and expense. Take photos, keep receipts and contact your Insurance Agent. A recovery plan can take these things into account and help you make the most of your time and money.  

How do I find out which roads are closed?

The city maintains an Interactive Road Closure map .

What if my backyard is stable, but I'm worried it's about to collapse? Where can I find help?

We recommend Angelenos to seek advice from a geotechnical expert. A professional can advise on the best ways to prevent or reduce landslide risk without creating further hazards.

My house was yellow or red tagged, what do I do? Where do I get updates from?

If evacuated, return home only when it has been indicated and safe to do so. The Department of Building and Safety will continue to communicate with impacted households until repairs have been completed. Find more information on how to determine when there is a threat of flash flooding and debris flows  here .

What if there is a broken pipe in my apartment or home?

Floodwaters damage materials, leaving mud, silt and contaminants that can promote the growth of  mold . You need to  safely and thoroughly dry your home to reduce these hazards and the damage they cause. LADWP recommends having an emergency supply of water in case the pipe infrastructure in your area receives damage during an emergency. Find disaster preparedness resources from LADWP   here .

How can I prepare for future flooding?

During the storm season, local Fire Stations offer free sand and sandbags. Find your local station  here .

How to report a power outage?

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3 Types of Online Backup for Business

Stylized buildings representing a bank, cafe, and law firm, each with a document icon above, symbolizing different types of online business backup solutions.

If you run a business, you know how important your company’s data is. While you can store your data backups on local drives, doing so significantly raises the risk of a data loss disaster. Fortunately, you can find several cloud backup solutions on the market today that will safeguard your data in the event of a malware breach, natural disaster, or hardware theft. As you decide how you’ll store your backup data, learn more about each of the three main types of online backup for businesses.

1. Full Backup

A full backup refers to a kind of online backup that copies every piece of data from a storage device. For example, a full online backup will copy your files, applications, and operating system before storing this data in the cloud. This type of backup system tends to be popular among businesses that want all their data stored in a single location. If something happens to their network, they can use the full backup to restore all their data.

While full backups can protect data, they come with a longer backup time. Since they copy all the data on your business’s devices and network, the backup process takes longer than it would with an incremental or differential backup. Besides taking longer, full backups also take up more storage space, which can make it so companies have to pay for larger storage plans.

Another potential issue with only relying on full backups is that companies typically only run full backups periodically. The periodic nature of these backups is due to the time they take, and if a data loss event occurs, you may lose months of work if you haven’t run a full backup recently. As a result, full backups are usually paired with differential or incremental backups.

2. Differential Backup

As a regular pairing to full backups, differential backups offer organizations the chance to update their data daily without causing disruptions. Unlike full backups that copy every piece of data, differential backups only back up new or changed data since the previous full backup. 

For example, if you run a full backup on the weekend and then a differential backup Monday evening, the differential backup will only copy any new or changed data since Sunday. Since the old, unchanged data is already stored in the full backup, differential backups won’t touch it. Keep in mind that the further you get from the full backup, the more data your differential backup will have to back up since it will continue to back up any files that have changed since the full backup. 

By eliminating the need to back up old data from before the last full backup, differential backups are much faster. Their speed makes it possible to run them more often, and they ensure new data is backed up long before your next full backup. Despite their advantages, differential backups aren’t the fastest backup solutions on the market. Additionally, companies usually can’t run them more than once a day since they store a significant amount of data, especially when it’s been a long time since the last full backup.

3. Incremental Backup

Incremental backups are similar to differential backups, but they offer greater speed and can be run several times throughout the day. An incremental backup will store changed data like a differential backup. However, it only stores any new or changed data from the last backup, which includes both full and incremental backups. Since they store data from the previous incremental backup, they copy a much smaller amount of data during the backup process.

Due to the way incremental backups only need to back up a smaller amount of data, they offer superior backup speeds compared to the other two forms of online backup for businesses. Their smaller backup sizes also mean they take up less space on the cloud, meaning you can still store all of your data while taking up much less space on your incremental backup provider’s cloud. Additionally, incremental backups allow you to cut down on data loss by backing up your data hourly or even more often. 

Are Community Collaboration Platforms Online Backups?

While community collaboration platforms (CCPs) are sometimes called online backups, the truth is that they aren’t . CCPs like Box, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive are often mistaken for online backups since they allow users to store documents and other files in the cloud. 

However, CCPs aren’t full online backup providers since they don’t back up all your organization’s data like incremental backups do, and they don’t offer reliable data restoration. Additionally, CCPs leave your data much more vulnerable to bad actors and mistakes, and relying on these platforms can make it so you don’t meet data-storage compliance requirements.

CrashPlan: Incremental Endpoint Backup

Whether you’re a small business looking for an affordable and secure cloud for your data or a larger business wanting to keep your most important files safe, CrashPlan can help. As an endpoint cloud data storage provider, CrashPlan offers robust security and cost-effective data storage plans designed to help businesses store their data. The incremental backup solution we offer ensures your data is discreetly backed up throughout the day, reducing the threat of data loss.

When you choose CrashPlan as your endpoint public cloud backup provider, your data storage needs are taken care of for you, freeing you to focus on more important tasks actually related to what your business does. We’ve built CrashPlan to work for companies of all sizes, with our Business plan designed for small businesses and Enterprise plan for larger ones. No matter the plan you select, you can expect to receive world-class security for your data hosted in an easy-to-use and customizable cloud environment. 

Learn more about our disaster recovery backup solutions today. You can also sign up for our free trial to see what CrashPlan can do for you.

About the Author

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IMAGES

  1. Disaster recovery vs. security recovery plans: Why you need separate

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

  2. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan and Why Does it Matter for Your

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

  3. How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

  4. Why It’s Important to Have a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

  5. What a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Is and How It Works

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

  6. Disaster Recovery Plan: Definition, Importance & Steps!

    why is a disaster recovery plan important for business

VIDEO

  1. How to Make a Disaster Recovery Plan

  2. Shielding Your Business: The Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan

  3. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? And How to Make one

  4. Disaster Recovery Framework for Small Business

  5. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

  6. How to write an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

COMMENTS

  1. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? Importance & Benefits

    The main goal of a disaster recovery plan is to minimize business disruption following a disaster, cyber incident or data loss event. Disaster recovery planning is critical to responding to unforeseen catastrophic incidents effectively and mitigating the effects on business.

  2. What is Disaster Recovery and Why Is It Important?

    Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial for any business, especially those operating either partially or entirely in the cloud.

  3. The importance of disaster recovery plans for businesses

    The purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to reduce damage or disruption and recover as quickly as possible in the event of a disaster that leads to system failure. DR plans usually have two key components: a recovery time objective (RTO) and a recovery point objective (RPO).

  4. What is a disaster recovery plan?

    A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a detailed document that outlines how an organization will respond to an unplanned incident. Along with business continuity plans (BCPs) and incident response plans (IRPs), DR plans help ensure businesses are prepared to face many different types of disasters, including power outages, ransomware and malware attacks, natural disasters and much more.

  5. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? + Complete Checklist

    A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a set of detailed, documented guidelines that outline a business' critical assets and explain how the organization will respond to unplanned incidents. Unplanned incidents or disasters typically include cyber attacks, system failures, power outages, natural disasters, equipment failures, or infrastructure ...

  6. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and How Do You Write One?

    Kate Brush Paul Crocetti, Executive Editor What is a disaster recovery plan (DRP)? A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented, structured approach that describes how an organization can quickly resume work after an unplanned incident. A DRP is an essential part of a business continuity plan ( BCP ).

  7. Business continuity and disaster recovery planning: The basics

    Disaster recovery plans will have to evolve to keep up with these changing business conditions. On top of that, business requirements for disaster recovery have changed dramatically....

  8. Disaster Recovery: An Introduction

    Business impact analysis. The creation of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan begins with business impact analysis. When performing this analysis, you'll create a series of detailed disaster scenarios that can then be used to predict the size and scope of the losses you'd incur if certain business processes were disrupted.

  9. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

    A disaster recovery plan (DR or DRP) is a formal document created by an organization that contains detailed instructions on how to respond to unplanned incidents such as natural disasters, power outages, cyber attacks and any other disruptive events. The plan contains strategies to minimize the effects of a disaster, so an organization can ...

  10. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? Definition + Strategies

    1. Business resumption plan 2. Occupant emergency plan 3. Continuity of operations plan 4. Incident management plan (IMP) 5. Disaster recovery plan Generally, components one through three do not touch upon IT infrastructure at all.

  11. What is Disaster Recovery, and why is it so important?

    A Disaster Recovery Plan is necessary when your Business Continuity Plan fails. Because no matter how well you protect your systems against downtime, your IT infrastructure can always be affected by a disaster or human error (intentional or unintentional).

  12. What is Disaster Recovery?

    A disaster recovery plan prompts the quick restart of backup systems and data so that operations can continue as scheduled. Enhances system security. Integrating data protection, backup, and restoring processes into a disaster recovery plan limits the impact of ransomware, malware, or other security risks for business.

  13. The Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan

    Disaster recovery planning is an important process for every business to go through. A disaster recovery plan requires identifying threats, setting goals of disaster recovery, researching the best ways to achieve those objectives, and testing the plan.

  14. What is business continuity disaster recovery?

    A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a contingency plan for how an enterprise will recover from an unexpected event. Alongside business continuity plans (BCPs), DR plans help businesses navigate different disaster scenarios, such as massive outages, natural disasters, ransomware and malware attacks, and many others.

  15. Why Is A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) So Important?

    Disaster recovery plans allow organizations to ensure they meet all compliance requirements, while also providing a clear roadmap to recovery. Some types of disasters that organizations can plan for include: Application failure Communication failure (Internet or power outage, etc) Data center disaster Building disaster (earthquake, fire, etc)

  16. What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan and Why Is It Important?

    Besides ensuring businesses can operate with minimal interruptions by preparing adequate resources to combat future catastrophes, a disaster recovery plan also helps to: Lessen damages and financial impacts as a result of the disruption Train employees about safety procedures in case of an emergency

  17. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan and Why is it Important?

    A disaster recovery plan, or DRP, is a formal document created by an organisation that details how to respond to various types of disasters. This will typically include things like power outages, cyber-attacks, including ransomware, and a range of other disruptive events. The best DRPs go beyond simply restoring data that has been lost.

  18. Why is Disaster Recovery Important for Businesses?

    A disaster recovery plan helps companies rapidly recover from unexpected events. Disaster recovery plans often apply to organizations that depend on functioning IT infrastructure in a...

  19. 5 Reasons Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

    The 5 Reasons You Need A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business Technical failures, cybercrime, human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Cybercrime Natural Disasters Terrorism Hardware Failure Human Error The Costs of Failure: What Lacking a Disaster Recovery Plan Can Mean for Your Business

  20. Why Disaster Recovery Planning is Important

    Enterprise IT Expert Why Disaster Recovery Planning is Important Disaster recovery planning is crucial to safe business operations but is usually the first thing cut when the budget gets tight.

  21. Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

    Having a disaster recovery plan in place helps businesses to outline parameters for getting back online while reducing the overall impact of downtime. This can include having a failover plan to get up and running through a secondary site. Data Security The backbone of most companies is the data that they generate, collect and store.

  22. Disaster Recovery vs Business Continuity: What You Need to Know

    A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a document that outlines the procedures and steps to restore your IT infrastructure and applications after a major incident, such as a natural disaster, a ...

  23. Business continuity vs. disaster recovery: Which plan is right ...

    Why are business continuity and disaster recovery plans important? Business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs) help organizations prepare for a broad range of unplanned incidents.

  24. Why is business continuity and disaster recovery plan important

    Disaster recovery planning (DRP) is a subset of business continuity planning (BCP) that specifically focuses on the recovery and restoration of critical systems, data, and infrastructure following a disruptive event. While BCP encompasses a broader scope of activities to ensure the overall continuity of business operations, DRP specifically ...

  25. Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: Key Differences

    A disaster recovery plan is more narrowly focused on restoring the elements that were damaged, such as your data and IT systems. ‍ How a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan overlap. Despite their differences, there are also many ways that continuity and disaster recovery plans overlap.

  26. February 2024 Storm Recovery

    State of California and LA County Disaster Recovery Services. State of California and LA County Disaster Recovery Services. IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR HOMEOWNERS, RENTERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS: ... and months after a disaster. To help communities recover, the Red Cross often brings groups and agencies together to plan recovery activities.

  27. The 3 Types of Cloud Backups for Companies

    If you run a business, you know how important your company's data is. While you can store your data backups on local drives, doing so significantly raises the risk of a data loss disaster. ... with our Business plan designed for small businesses and Enterprise plan for larger ones. No matter the plan you select, you can expect to receive ...