Disaster Recovery Planning Best Practices

A disaster recovery plan is a documented policy or process that helps organisations protect their IT infrastructure and promote recovery after a disaster. It outlines the necessary actions to be taken before, during, and after a natural or man-made disaster, ensuring that the entire team can follow them.

Causes of Disasters

The types of disasters you are most likely to experience differ greatly depending on where your infrastructure is located. in fact, Hurricanes in the tropics, tornadoes in the central south, earthquakes in California, and power outages everywhere else can all have a negative influence on the data centres that are maintained.

When you know which calamities are most likely to occur, you may plan accordingly. You may even create a statistical model to predict the frequency and severity of disasters that would attack your infrastructure.

Planning Outline

In practice, successful disaster recovery planning necessitates much more. It includes writing precise, step-by-step instructions for recovering data and infrastructure. These plans should additionally specify:

• Which personnel will handle catastrophe recovery responsibilities.
• How rapidly recovery tasks must be completed to meet RTO and RPO standards.
• How catastrophe recovery processes may differ between facilities or sites.
• Whether disaster recovery procedures for hardware must be undertaken separately from disaster recovery for software.

Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist
Now let’s talk about the measures you should take to create your disaster recovery plan. The disaster recovery strategy will differ depending on the company’s requirements and weaknesses. The following sections highlight the key areas of focus that a typical business must address as part of its disaster recovery plan.

• Business Impact Analysis
• Recovery Strategies
• Disaster Recovery Plan Development
• Disaster Recovery Plan Testing

Analysis of Business Impact

Assessing how a disaster would affect the different parts of the company and how soon a recovery would need to be finished to prevent a serious issue is the first stage in creating a disaster recovery plan. You will need to collaborate closely with department heads and key individuals to ascertain how the crisis may affect various areas of your organisation.

After evaluating the effects of a disaster, you can create RTO and RPO objectives to determine what must be retrieved and how soon recovery must occur.

Techniques for Recovery

Creating a real recovery plan would be the next step after your RTO is prepared. You must determine whether the resources you presently own satisfy the different RTO and RPO objectives in order to accomplish this.

• Do you have enough people prepared to accomplish your objectives in the event of a disaster?
• Do you have enough network capacity and backup infrastructure?
• If you need new software or hardware, will you be able to get it in time?

You can create the general recovery techniques that will serve as the foundation for your disaster recovery strategy by providing answers to queries such as these.

Creation of a Disaster Recovery Plan

You are now prepared to fill in the specifics of putting your disaster recovery plan into action. To accomplish this, you should:

• Create a comprehensive plan framework that outlines the many elements of your strategy.
• Determine who will carry out the plan or its sub-plans.
• Create strategies for moving data, software, or hardware after a disaster.
• Outline the precise disaster recovery protocols that must be adhered to, as well as how to obtain any specialized data needed to carry out the protocols.
• Keep track of manual workarounds that your team can use in the event that the primary disaster recovery plan doesn’t work.
• Create the plan and present it to management for approval.

Testing of Disaster Recovery Plans

It’s time to test the plan after it has been developed. To ensure that everything goes according to plan, practise the disaster recovery methods. Ensure that every employee involved in disaster recovery protocols understands their responsibilities, how to carry them out, and how to obtain any information they might need in an emergency. Before a real disaster occurs, make sure to record the outcomes of these tests and go over them to find any holes that need to be filled. In conclusion

In conclusion

It may feel like you can put off catastrophe recovery planning until tomorrow. However, don’t fool yourself into believing that effective catastrophe recovery can be carried out quickly during a significant disruption. The reality is different, which is why having a thorough disaster recovery plan in place far in advance of a crisis is crucial. To learn more about the best practices for disaster recovery planning and to get a basic template that may help you organise your plan, check out our white paper.