Why Your Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan is a vital thing to have in times of growing economic uncertainty and a rapidly evolving cyberthreat landscape.

No sensible person would ever drive a car without first making sure they have a valid insurance policy. For the same reasons, no business should be without a disaster recovery plan. While it might not always be possible to plan for every eventuality, a robust and regularly reviewed and updated disaster recovery plan is, effectively, an insurance policy. It is a vital component of business continuity and one that specifically seeks to address the immediacy of unexpected incidents to ensure the business’s survival.

Why Disaster Recovery Planning Revolves Around IT

Every organisation can be defined as the collaboration of people, assets, finance and time to create information which, in turn, needs governance—and governance incorporates protection. As we enter an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which information primarily exists in digital form, it stands to reason that disaster recovery should center around IT systems and operations. In other words, protecting your data is tantamount to protecting your business.

Given the enormous reliance that today’s organizations have on digital technologies, it also makes sense that that is where most of the risks lie. Common threats include natural disasters, human error and cyberattacks—any of which can take down mission-critical systems. Moreover, the costs of downtime are growing all the time. These costs are not always of a financial nature either—in the case of the health care sector, for example, unscheduled downtime can mean the difference between sickness and health.

Insofar as financial costs are concerned, the need for IT disaster recovery planning should be very clear. Extended periods of downtime can leave customers unable to use your services or buy your products or receive the support and customer experience they expect. The modern customer is unforgiving simply because they have more choices than ever before.

What Are the Threats Facing Today’s Data Systems?

In these unpredictable times, disaster can strike at any time. While insurance can help mitigate financial losses to your business, some things are priceless. For example, you cannot place a tangible value on areas like employee productivity and morale or brand reputation. To protect these things, you need to protect your systems and data from a range of threats.

Natural Disasters

The stark truth is that most businesses never reopen if their premises are severely damaged or destroyed by a natural disaster. While physical assets, such as office buildings and product stocks might be financially compensated by insurance, the same cannot be said of data. The value of data and system uptime is, after all, impossible to accurately quantify. Protecting your business against disasters like fires, storms and floods, requires having an off-site backup of all your data—preferably one that is updated in real-time.

No matter how well-trained and well-prepared your employees are, no one is perfect and we are all capable of making errors. Sometimes, those errors can result in serious downtime and permanent data loss. Human error is also one of the weakest links in cybersecurity, whereby people fall foul of social engineering scams. The best way to protect against human error is to ensure that your backup and disaster recovery strategy is fully automated and that your staff is well-versed in what their responsibilities are in the event of a disaster.

Cyberattacks

These days, the single greatest threat to modern organizations is cyberattacks. From critical infrastructure to high-street retail and everything in between, every organization is a potential target—no matter how small or how large. While every business should take a multi-layered and proactive approach to information security to minimize the chances of an attack happening in the first place, it is always vital to prepare for the worst. Therefore, a comprehensive disaster recovery plan should consider not only data recovery but also areas like the reputational and operational impact of a disaster.

Hardware Failures

All computer hardware is prone to failure. Even a power surge can result in irreparable damage to a data-bearing device like a workstation or server. These days, most businesses keep their data in the cloud, which helps protect it from localized disasters. However, hardware failures can affect public and private cloud data centers and colocation facilities as well, even though many of us take cloud storage for granted. Because of this, organizations should always keep multiple recent backups of their data with multiple vendors in different physical locations.

From Backup to Disaster Recovery

Most business leaders are well aware of the need to back up their data. One of the most time-honored backup strategies is the 3-2-1 backup rule, whereby there are three copies of your data stored on two different media types and one off-site copy. Given the prevalence of cloud computing, however, it is generally better to have at least two off-site copies stored in different facilities with different vendors.

Data backup is, of course, only the first part of the equation. It is just as important to have a robust recovery process. Disaster recovery refers to data recovery in the event of loss, as well as the recovery of operations. When formulating your disaster recovery strategy, two key variables are at play – how much data you can afford to lose and how much downtime you can tolerate. These are recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Depending on how important a given data set or system is to your organization, you will need to prioritize carefully and set different RPOs and RTOs for each. This is why you need to have complete, granular control over your systems and data through the ability to mobilize apps, analyze application data, recover from ransomware attacks and provide prompt application availability.

With a robust backup and disaster recovery system that spans your entire operational environment, you can rise to the challenges of scale and prepare for practically any unknowns.

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Mitch Mitchell

Mitch is a founder of ContinuSys, which is an Integrated Business Management system (IBMS) that helps organisations become resilient against short and long-term disruptions. The IBMS ecosystem specifically helps businesses in developing and implementing robust business continuity plans to ensure uninterrupted business operations.

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