Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery planning is the process of creating a plan to restore your business operations in the event of a disaster.

Disaster recovery planning is important because it can help you minimise the impact of a disaster, such as data loss or ransomware attacks on your business and get you back up and running as quickly as possible.

The steps involved in disaster recovery planning include: Step 1: Identifying your critical business assets Step 2: Developing a plan for how you will protect your critical assets Step 3: Testing your plan regularly Step 4: Communicating your plan to your employees

You should test your disaster recovery plan regularly, at least once a year. Regular testing helps to identify gaps in planning and helps to develop routines that can be used in the event of a real-world incident. This test might involve: 1 - Reviewing your documentation process: Documenting everything is important to ensure all stakeholders remain informed and access the documents they require. 2 - Scenario testing: Test your plan in a variety of different scenarios to ensure your plan is adequate. 3- Testing your backup and restore process: This will allow you to assess if you can successfully restore your data from your backups. Paired with Scenario testing, you can do this by simulating a disaster, such as a data loss through a power outage or a hardware failure. You should then attempt to restore your data from your backups. 4- Testing your communication plan: It is important to keep lines of communication with each stakeholder to ensure the correct steps are taken in the event of a real-world incident. This means testing that you can communicate with your employees, customers, and other stakeholders in the event of a disaster. You can do this by sending out test messages and emails and then verifying that they were received. 5- Running a tabletop exercise: This type of testing allows you and your team to simulate potential disasters and assesses the effectiveness of everyone’s response to a real-world incident.

Everyone in your organisation should be involved in disaster recovery planning, from the CTO to the front-line employees. Your CTO should know how to manage the disaster recovery team and deploy procedures for data recovery, whilst front-line employees should be able to carry out their predetermined tasks.

There are two main types of disaster recovery plans: 1 - Active/active disaster recovery plans 2 - Active/passive disaster recovery plans Active/active disaster recovery plans have two data centres that are both active at the same time. If one data centre goes down, the other data centre can take over immediately. Active/passive disaster recovery plans have one data centre that is active and one data centre that is passive. If the active data centre goes down, the passive data centre can take over, but it will take some time to get up and running.

The cost of disaster recovery planning will vary depending on the size and complexity of your business. However, disaster recovery planning is a relatively inexpensive investment that can save you a lot of time and money in the event of a disaster.

There are many resources available to help you with disaster recovery planning. You can find books, articles, and online courses on the subject. You can also hire a consultant to help you create a disaster recovery plan.