A business suffers from various kinds of disasters, hence the recovery for each kind of disaster varies to a certain degree as well. A couple of conditions that should be commonly accepted as disaster by all the departments related to IT, admin and sales are either data loss or the downtime experienced by site.
IT disaster comprises of an unexpected event that leads to a substantial amount of loss. Either the loss could be in the form of revenue due to downtime or it could in the form of loss of data. Though we anticipate that a disaster would be the result of something catastrophic, yet it is a result of any wrong action that was simply not anticipated.
Steps to Building a Business – Oriented Disaster Recovery Plan
While the disaster is usually unpredictable, the disaster recovery plans are the result of a thorough thought process that leads to meticulous planning. Here are few simple steps to building a business-oriented disaster recovery plan. If you simply follow these steps, you will be able to come up with a perfect disaster recovery plan as per the requirement of your business.
Inventory Listing and Mapping
Take into account the list of all your IT assets, including the virtual assets. To simplify things make a list of all the servers and storage devices. Map them via networks, including network switches and appliances. Take into account all the access points and make a detailed list of all the associated software, apps and data. Plan the dependencies or each object as well.
Once you have made a list of all the virtual and physical IT assets, map the physical as well virtual location of each asset and object/identity. Ensure that the mapping is exclusive and includes all the access points as well as all the dependencies.
Assess the Risk
To assess the risk, make a table, list all the assets and the dependencies. In the next column, list the threats that can lead to a disaster. Ensure that all the threats are covered, irrespective of the size of the threat. A small threat such as power loss can result in a major disaster. Hence, consider the worst-case scenarios; conduct a thorough research; educate yourself about the threats and disasters that other have faced; find out the issues that industry experts are concerned about. Do not forget that the threats sometimes can be a result of a human cause.
Sort the Probability
In the next column, list and categorize the probability of the occurrence of that event such as ‘very high, high, average, low and extremely unlikely’. In the next column, make a note that how could that disaster affect the business. In the column that is next to each business asset, list the importance of that asset, frequency or upgrade or procurement and the retention policy.
While the initial glance at the number of dependencies can let you determine the importance of an asset, you can take a help of your importance of cyber security training in organization as well. Your IT staff will be able to identify the hardware easily as well as the software assets and sort them in order of their importance since they deal with the application and data sets on a daily basis.
Also, classify the assets as per their importance, retention and frequency of procurement in descending order. Sort the ‘probability of occurrence’ in descending order as well.
Now, the data that you are looking at is of highly critical assets that have the highest risk with the high probability of occurrence. Grouping and sorting the data helps to implement the strategy for business-oriented disaster recovery plan. However, it is important to include your staff in the process since it will not only speed up the process, but also will deflate the chances of hollow assumptions.
Define the Objectives of the Business-Oriented Disaster Recovery Plan
Since each business and its process have distinct objective and different objectives, hence it is important to include the managers of each process. Once the objective of the disaster recovery is clear, you can go ahead with designing the disaster recovery plan.
Pick the Right Tools Along With Appropriate Techniques for Disaster Recovery
A wide range of disaster recovery solution is available; however, you must pick the one that can offer comprehensive protections using the latest techniques and minimize the risks. The organization should avoid over protection cost as it creates unnecessary complexity in an organization while on the other side, lacking defenses also puts organizations at risk.
Another important aspect of disaster recovery is the off-site asset protection. Irrespective of the kind of backup method being used, it is imperative that it should meet with the recovery objectives. The off-site assets and on-site assets should be treated equally with the same treatment.
Another important point to note is that the point of Tips that Save Time in Data Backup must never be on the same premises or even too close to the source. Keep the backup at a safe distance so it can be actually available when you require it.
Disaster Recovery Plan:
Conduct a dry run and evaluate the set objectives against its achievement. The disaster recovery plan must be able to cover the maximum number of objectives laid before. Once the process is perfectly implemented, ensure that your staff receives ample training to implement the same. If the process is automated, it will give you better results.
Conclusion:
Hence, implementation of an automated disaster recovery plan ensures that the process will be available as soon as the requirement arises.
With the technology as well as the business requirements being ever progressed, they are not constant, but variable; hence, it is important that the business oriented disaster recovery plan should evolve at regular intervals to cope with changing business requirements.
