Such a plan can help your business minimize server downtime, enhance IT infrastructure, and restore critical systems online. So, if you are contemplating whether you require a disaster recovery plan, you have stumbled upon the right place. Keep reading for more information.
Disaster Recovery Plan Explained
A disaster recovery plan is an extensive document that helps businesses react to any disaster and prevent damages. It allows organizations to respond quickly and recover operations as soon as possible. This plan also includes IT disasters that businesses must prevent or sort out if something happens.
Typically, disaster recovery plans can include the following:
- Emergency procedure the staff needs to follow
- Disaster recovery team
- Technologies and tools to use for recovery
- Critical IT assets
- And more
Any time your IT equipment or digital infrastructure fails, the plan will help you get back on your feet in no time. Hiring online disaster recovery services is best to create a foolproof plan to ensure your business doesn’t suffer losses.
Creating A Foolproof Disaster Recovery Plan: A Step-By-Step Guide
A disaster recovery plan is not as simple as writing a plan and document. Instead, it involves extensive research to help your organization understand the risks it faces and what it can do about it. Coordinating the plan with everyone important in the business is also crucial.
Then, you need to test the plan and see if it actually works practically. Once you have the plan, you must also keep updating it to ensure its relevance for a long time.
Here is a step-by-step guide to creating a disaster recovery plan, as stated by our IT experts:
Mapping And Auditing Assets
The first step to creating a plan is to identify what it is that you must protect. These can include the following:
- Important data
- Network equipment
- Cloud services
- Software and hardware
- And more
A good practice to map out these assets is to know what IT resources are utilized in the daily operations of your business and what impact they have. Once you have this information, you can create an inventory of the IT infrastructure of your business.
There may be resources or data that might not be critical for your business. You will save storage space and expenses when you sort out unnecessary assets and redundancies. Then, you can streamline and consolidate the resources available to make them easy to back up and recover data if anything arises.
Identify Critical Assets And Operations
If something is not adding value to your business, it is better to let it go. You must identify what assets and operations you need during a disaster. For example, for many businesses, data is the most important asset they require, even during a disaster.
Our online disaster recovery services experts recommend that you must classify the assets into high impact, medium, and then low. Classification will help you understand how likely an asset will disrupt business operations. Then, you can decide what assets are the most critical to protect in the face of any disaster.
Assess Risks
Risk assessment is an important part of any online disaster recovery service plan. You must identify which IT threats your business and its assets will likely face. A good practice for this is to interview the staff who work on critical systems and ask them what causes the most service interruptions.
Here are the key aspects to take into consideration when conducting risk assessment:
- Analyze functional areas in the business: Such an analysis will help you identify any possible consequences, such as data leakage or loss
- Risk evaluation and define objectives: Evaluating and setting objectives will help you enable recovery and continuity even in the face of disaster
- Determine infrastructure or geographical risk factors: Risk analysis will help you factor in complicated risks so organizations can prepare a suitable recovery strategy
Online disaster recovery services will conduct an extensive risk analysis to provide you with a complete picture of everything you must do to protect your business.
Define Objectives And Goals
Every recovery plan should have clear-cut goals and objectives to provide a direction to your plan. Our experts can consult with senior staff and management to understand the impact of interruptions and what systems are critical. Then, we can use this information to define objectives and goals important to your business.
We can calculate the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). These will help you set the limits within which your recovery plan can operate.
Here is what they both represent:
- RTO: This represents the maximum number of minutes, days, or hours your business can survive an IT outage.
- RPO: The amount of transaction data your business can afford to lose during an outage and survive
-
Disaster Recovery Setup
Now that you have all the information, our online disaster recovery services can envision your setup. For example, we can decide whether:
- Will you have a site for your disaster recovery?
- Where will your site be located?
- Will you self-host the site, or will it be cloud-based?
- Which replicas or backups will you maintain?
When we have this information, we can envision and implement your setup in the best way possible. Our team will select the hardware, cloud services, and relevant partners to help you achieve the setup of your dreams. If you need anything from us, feel free to let us know.
Set The Budget
Your budget can make or break your decision to opt for disaster recovery. Every business has a limited budget that they can spend on various things. Our online disaster recovery services will provide you with various options you can choose from, depending on your budget.
You can select the best plan that you think will suit your budget along with your business needs. It will enable you to choose between investment and risk in disaster recovery technology.
Communicating The Plan
Once the budget and setup are done, it is time to communicate the plan to senior management. We will circulate the document to your disaster recovery and senior management teams. Then, the plan will also be communicated to anyone involved in this or affected by disaster recovery.
It is up to you who you want to involve in your disaster recovery. We leave this discretion to the company as you better understand your organization and staff.
Testing The Plan
Finally, it is time to test the plan by conducting a disaster drill and checking whether your staff will act according to the plan we have set. Doing this will allow us to witness gaps and fill them with the right techniques. It will also ensure the plan is relevant to your IT structure and setup.
Remember that reviewing the plan from time to time is also just as crucial. For example, you should review your disaster recovery plan every six months. It will give you an idea of whether the plan is relevant and reflects your business and setup.
Online Disaster Recovery Services: Choose Q4 Gems As Your Plan Partner
Now that you have taken a deep dive into our process of disaster recovery plans, you can decide whether you want to opt for our services. We have helped hundreds of businesses with setting up successful disaster recovery. Our organization also offers extensive IT managed services in Toronto to complement your IT infrastructure.
You can book an initial consultation with us to understand our process and decide whether it will be right for your business. For more information regarding our services, please contact us immediately.
Final Thoughts
If you need to learn how to create a disaster recovery plan, we recommend outsourcing your disaster recovery services to Q4 Gems. We will conduct audits, risk assessments and create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan to handle any IT disaster your company faces.
You will face fewer issues in the long run, and your business operations will run as smoothly as possible. For all your IT needs, you can outsource these services by contacting our professionals.
