What is a Disaster Recovery Plan? Here’s What to Know

Business owners should be thinking about disaster recovery for work continuity. Every business owner should have reliable backups for their business. A DRP (disaster recovery plan) should be in place for your business. Learn what a DRP is and how you can formulate one.

What is a DRP?

A DRP for your business is a well-structured, written plan that outlines how your business will start working again after a disaster. It is a part of your business continuity plan. It will include reliable backups, how you will restart work, and other details about recovering from an unplanned incident. A disaster can be any incident that stops workflow. It can be a natural disaster like a hurricane, it can be a local disaster like a fire, and it can be an IT disaster where all your data has been compromised.

A Focus On Minimizing Effects Of The Disaster

A well-defined DRP can help to minimize the effects of a disaster. The plan should include a setup that will allow critical functions of the enterprise to continue during the disaster or to resume shortly after the disaster. Reliable backups are key to your plan.

Part of the Plan is to Test Your Plan

It is important to have a written plan that provides directions. However, you should test the plan every few months to ensure that it works. For example, test your backups. According to TechT, about 25% of organizations do not ever test their DRS (disaster recovery system). You do not want any surprises in the case of a disaster. Test your DRS to ensure it is functional.

Plan for This

There are several incidences that your organization should include in the DRP. Power outages, communication failures, natural disasters, regional problems, global disasters, campus, and building disasters, and cyber attacks. Each one of the aforementioned events could shut down your business if you do not have a plan in place for work continuity and a DRP.

Get Prepared

Before you design your plan, be sure that you have the tools in place to carry out your plan. Do you have reliable backups? If not, it is time to put them in place.

In today’s world you never know what could happen. Be prepared. Reach out to a company like us at The Ame Group that can help with your disaster recovery plan today.