Future-Proofing Your Data
How to Write a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business
A DR plan consists of the policies and procedures that a given entity – in your case, your business – will follow when IT services are disrupted. This could happen because of a natural disaster, or as a result of technological failure or human factors such as sabotage or terrorism. The basic idea is to restore the affected business processes as quickly as possible, whether by bringing disrupted services back online or by switching to a contingency system.
Your DR plan should take into account the following:
- IT services: Which business processes are supported by which systems? What are the risks?
- People: Who are the stakeholders, on both the business and IT side, in a given DR process?
- Suppliers: Which external suppliers would you need to contact in the event of an IT outage? Your data recovery provider, for example.
- Locations: Where will you work if your normal premises are rendered inaccessible?
- Testing: How will you test the DR plan?
- Training: What training and documentation will be provided to end users?