Most people associate disaster recovery with large-scale natural disasters such as fires, floods, or earthquakes. In the cybersecurity world, however, not all tragedies are natural. Man-made disasters strike many firms in the form of cyberattacks that damage data or leave crucial assets inoperable.
Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a critical risk mitigation technique, whether your company is facing a natural disaster or a cybersecurity threat.
What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?
A disaster recovery plan is a set of tools and procedures that a company uses to recover from a severe outage of its IT infrastructure. Depending on the organization’s existing assets and recovery goals, disaster recovery planning might include a range of strategies.
6 Steps to Develop a Better Disaster Recovery Plan
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Make a complete backup of your data:
Backup is a no-brainer solution and the first step toward data recovery. When we plan something, we usually have a backup plan in case it doesn’t work out. Similarly, it is critical to have data backup procedures in place from a commercial standpoint.
Backing up your files can be done in a variety of ways. You have the option of using cloud services, purchasing an external hard disc, or investing in storage solutions such as RAID.
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Audit All of Your IT Resources
Before you can plan for things to get back to “normal,” you need to know what that means for your company. Part of this is identifying all of the diverse assets on your company’s network architecture.
You may begin to simplify and streamline things by developing an inventory of all of the IT resources on your network—and what data each resource holds—to make it easier to back up and retrieve information in the future.
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Determine Everyone’s Roles and Responsibilities in the DR Plan
Every person in your company should be included in your disaster recovery strategy. Even something as simple as reporting cybersecurity issues higher up the chain of command to someone with greater seniority or knowledge of how to put the DR plan into action might be essential.
When everyone knows what to do in the event of a crisis, your disaster recovery plan will be more effective than if no one knows what to do.
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Set Your Recovery Goals
In the event of a tragedy, how rapidly should your company be able to recover? In the event of a calamity, how much (and what) data can you afford to lose? To create an effective disaster recovery plan, you’ll need to set goals for recovery point and recovery time targets.
When it comes to RPOs and RTOs, you may want to make sure that some data is prioritized over others. Less vital data that doesn’t need to be accessible immediately away, for example, could be given a lower priority, resulting in a longer recovery time and a lack of frequent backups.
Mission-critical data, on the other hand, such as financial data for accounts payable and receivable or data necessary for regulatory compliance, should have significantly tighter RPOs and RTOs to avoid disruption. This could entail making frequent backups of this data or even implementing a disaster recovery strategy that includes a backup production server that will take over for the primary server in the event of a disaster.
