8 Essential Components of an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan
Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2025 10:16 am
So far in 2020, reorganization following the 11 largest ransomware attacks has cost municipal governments, universities, and private companies more than $144 million, not counting lost productivity and reputational damage.
Disasters strike organizations in many ways, from ransomware to lightning strikes, without any warning. So it's critical to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan designed, implemented, and tested long before you might need it.
Your DR plan should exist as part of a comprehensive business continuity plan, and at a minimum, include these eight elements.
1. Complete inventory of hardware/software/other equipment
When creating a DR plan, you need to consider what resources you will need to recover. Take a complete inventory of every piece of hardware, software, and peripheral that touches your networks or is used by your employees, contractors, and vendors.
This will be a fairly extensive project, as you will need to latvia whatsapp data consider all the on-premise, cloud-based, mobile/BYOD technologies and tools your organization uses.
2. Documented business objectives
Disaster recovery is sometimes more about business decisions than IT decisions. So it's imperative to involve all business units and stakeholders in the conversation about business objectives so you know where to focus first during recovery.
Start by mapping your entire infrastructure to ensure that all systems are accounted for. Once you know what is being protected, you can set priorities to ensure that the most important applications and systems are up and running first.
Divide systems and applications into three tiers to facilitate recovery efforts:
Critical Items: These are the first priority. Back up these systems immediately to prevent massive data loss or serious disruption to business operations.
Essential: These systems are less critical and may be unavailable for up to 24 hours without causing significant impact to the business.
Non-essential: Applications that have a lower priority because businesses can operate without them for a few days.
Be sure to consider system dependencies in your business objectives, as they may impact how you prioritize your recovery efforts.
3. Defined tolerance for downtime and data loss
With your business goals documented in hand, you can define recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These are the measurements you’ll use to determine your tolerance for downtime and data loss . In other words, these measurements will allow you to determine how long an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business (RTO), and how much data could be lost before significant damage to the business occurs (RPO).
Disasters strike organizations in many ways, from ransomware to lightning strikes, without any warning. So it's critical to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan designed, implemented, and tested long before you might need it.
Your DR plan should exist as part of a comprehensive business continuity plan, and at a minimum, include these eight elements.
1. Complete inventory of hardware/software/other equipment
When creating a DR plan, you need to consider what resources you will need to recover. Take a complete inventory of every piece of hardware, software, and peripheral that touches your networks or is used by your employees, contractors, and vendors.
This will be a fairly extensive project, as you will need to latvia whatsapp data consider all the on-premise, cloud-based, mobile/BYOD technologies and tools your organization uses.
2. Documented business objectives
Disaster recovery is sometimes more about business decisions than IT decisions. So it's imperative to involve all business units and stakeholders in the conversation about business objectives so you know where to focus first during recovery.
Start by mapping your entire infrastructure to ensure that all systems are accounted for. Once you know what is being protected, you can set priorities to ensure that the most important applications and systems are up and running first.
Divide systems and applications into three tiers to facilitate recovery efforts:
Critical Items: These are the first priority. Back up these systems immediately to prevent massive data loss or serious disruption to business operations.
Essential: These systems are less critical and may be unavailable for up to 24 hours without causing significant impact to the business.
Non-essential: Applications that have a lower priority because businesses can operate without them for a few days.
Be sure to consider system dependencies in your business objectives, as they may impact how you prioritize your recovery efforts.
3. Defined tolerance for downtime and data loss
With your business goals documented in hand, you can define recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These are the measurements you’ll use to determine your tolerance for downtime and data loss . In other words, these measurements will allow you to determine how long an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business (RTO), and how much data could be lost before significant damage to the business occurs (RPO).