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How to Develop a Reliable Business Disaster Recovery Plan

How to Develop a Reliable Business Disaster Recovery Plan

June 30, 2022

In today’s digital world, we rely on our business technology more than ever. That’s why you should be doing everything you can to protect your data and technology. In order for your business to stay protected, you need a disaster recovery plan.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, one in five businesses doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan. That means that 20% of businesses would struggle to recover if they experienced a disaster. These disasters can range from storms and earthquakes to cyberattacks, network outages and human error. That’s why it’s so important that you have a plan in place for these scenarios.  

Let’s discuss a few ways to prevent a disaster from impacting your business.  

Four Simple Steps to Creating Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Step 1: Run a Business Impact Analysis

Run a business impact analysis on your current processes. This analysis is perfect for finding any gaps in your business. That way, when you see those vulnerabilities, you can get the information you need to create a disaster recovery strategy.  

Step 2: Identify Your Critical Business Functions

Based on the results of your analysis, your next step should be to identify and document your critical business functions. With your analysis, you should now be able to see how your business would fare if it were hit by a disaster. From there, you can identify what parts of your business processes need to be improved.  

Step 3: Begin Developing Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Now is when you start developing your disaster recovery plan. For your plan to be successful, you should organize your recovery teams, create points of contact in the event of a disaster, write the procedures needed in the event of a disaster and communicate these procedures with your entire team.  

Step 4: Test Your Plan & Train Your Team

Finally, test how your disaster recovery plan works. Testing your plan with mock scenarios is crucial to make sure that everything is solid with no gaps. Once that’s figured out, it’s important that your team is trained on these procedures so that they’re also prepared if a disaster strikes.

Final Thoughts

A solid disaster recovery plan can give you peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and secure.  

There can be many challenges to developing your own plan, and it can be a extremely time-consuming task. That’s where we come in — our experts can assess your IT infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, address the gaps, develop a disaster recovery plan and test that plan for you. At First Column IT, our IT experts are ready to help you develop a plan to keep your business data safe and backed up.  

Looking to learn more about disaster recovery and other cyber tips? Check out more of our blogs in our resources section.

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