Planning For a Disaster With A Good Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster Recovery Plans

Disaster Recovery Plans are needed for all sorts of events. Extreme heat, fires, a tornado and now major floods and landslides. It sounds like the plot of a disaster action movie. However, for those of us who live in Southern BC, this describes 2021 alone.

Yes.. it has been quite a crazy year… and all of this on top of the pandemic that just won’t go away.

This past week alone has been a great reminder of how important it is to have a Disaster Recovery Plan. And yet, 1 in 5 businesses still do not have one.

While recent events have already hit BC businesses hard, they are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of disasters that can take down your systems.

Scarily, only 6% of IT disasters are caused by natural disasters like these.  There are many other types that are far more common. Things like ransomware attacks, network outages, hardware failures and human error.

Preparing for these disasters can save your business time and money… and even the business itself.

So, where do you start?

Every business is different. And every business has different challenges. There is no one-size-fits-all Disaster Recovery Plan, but this list will help you to get started…

Identify the Risks

First, you need to work out exactly what risks your company could face. Also, how would each of these risks affect our business specifically if they were to happen? Have a page in your plan for each risk you can think of.

Procedures

Now that you have a list of risks (or collection of pages with a risk on each), go through each risk and write a procedure of exactly what steps you need to take in that event. Include which staff members are responsible for carrying out each task.

Preventative Measures

Go through the list again and look at what procedures you can put in place to avoid these risks affecting your business. I know we have said it before… but we are going to say it again! High on this list should be having good, regular backups!

Emergency Contact List

Put together a list of people who should be contacted first in each emergency. Your plan can have a master contact list AND add specific contacts to the procedures in the relevant risk pages.

Run Disaster Recovery Plan Drills

Once all your plans are in place, and staff are trained or informed on what to do, test your plans! Testing helps in 2 ways. It makes everyone better aware with what they are supposed to do, and it can highlight any flaws in your plan.

Once you have a set of disaster recovery plans, and everyone is up-to-date, you have already tackled half the battle to recovery!

If you are in the BC Lower Mainland and need help with putting the tech side of your plans into place (especially having good preventative measures), contact us! Our dedicated team of tech experts have helped many businesses both prepare and recover from such disasters. Fire, flood, cyberattacks – we have experience in them all!