Over the past couple of decades, our computer usage has increased tremendously, and it’s only continuing to grow. Due to its overpowering usage, it has become essential now more than ever to have data protection. In our digital world, where we use technology for almost everything, time lost from a disastrous event can severely damage a business.
After a business has encountered a disaster, downtime can result in costly damages on top of data loss. How fast can you recover from a disaster, and how exactly can you plan for it?
As you continue reading, we’ll discuss why a disaster recovery policy is essential and how your business can implement a disaster recovery policy.
Why is a Disaster Recovery Policy Essential?
There are three main reasons why a disaster recovery policy is essential that include preventing lost data, minimizing downtime, and maintaining customer satisfaction.
Lost data is one of the most prominent and main reasons why it’s essential to have a disaster recovery policy. How well you create your policy and put it into place will determine just how much data your business will lose during a disaster. Data is one of the most essential elements in business, and preventing or minimizing data loss is vital.
After minimizing the amount of lost data, minimizing your financial losses is also essential. To minimize financial losses, you’ll need to reduce your downtime. After a disaster occurs, some downtime occurs as teams work tirelessly to recover data and get their business back to running.
The last reason why a disaster recovery policy is essential is because of customer satisfaction. The top priority for any business is to keep its customers satisfied. If your customers aren't happy, they will take their business elsewhere. Minimizing downtime and reducing the amount of data loss is one way to keep your customer satisfaction at excellent levels.
How to Implement a Disaster Recovery Policy?
Read on to find out how your business can implement a disaster recovery policy.
Have a Team of Experts
When you create a disaster recovery policy, it requires a team of experts and is no one-person job. A disaster recovery policy involves teamwork between internal and external employees. A great group of experts to implement a disaster recovery policy will do the following:
- Knowledge of Infrastructure - Implementing a disaster recovery policy requires knowledge of hardware, data, and other networks. Meaning your employees from your company's IT department should consist of your team of experts.
- Have a business representative - While each organization functions differently, they all have regulations to meet. It is essential to have a business representative when implementing a disaster recovery policy.
- Have higher-ups involved - Since every disaster recovery policy has its specific goals, your organization’s strategies are essential to meet your disaster recovery policy goals. Having upper management involved is vital to creating the best policy.
- HR representatives - You should have a Human Resources representative present to ensure communications run smoothly.
Aside from these team members, you should also add law enforcement employees and emergency responders to your disaster recovery policy. It’s essential to notice that these areas should be updated routinely.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A business impact analysis is one of the best ways to implement a disaster recovery policy. During this process, you'll break down your assets and services based on how long your business can function without suffering any losses or penalties if your assets don't perform well.
Your business assets may include hardware, software, networks, or SaaS services. This process is combined with costs, legal requirements, license keys, and much more.
Create Goals
Once you've completed the business impact analysis, you can now focus on your IT infrastructure regarding the cost of downtime. With this step, you can create goals for each function of your company.
Your first goal might be to calculate the recovery time. The recovery time is how long your company can be offline without suffering a considerable impact. Another goal would be to prevent data loss and to create a backup.
With a recovery point objective, you can determine how often you need to back up data for each of your assets. It’s essential to remember that each organization has its own regulations, so make sure you’re covering all of your bases to prevent legal issues.
Risk Assessment
When you're making your business impact analysis, it focuses on what your organization has to lose. During your risk assessment, you'll look into any reason why you suffered a loss. When conducting a risk assessment, make sure you do the following:
- Look into threats - Threats to your business could include anything, such as data center failures, shutdowns, cyberattacks, and more. To protect your business from potential threats, ensure that your team is conducting regular maintenance and has the proper security and protection from outages and ransomware.
- Study vulnerabilities - With every vulnerability, there are resources you’ll use to fix it. If you don’t address a potential threat, this could cost you more long-term.
- Have a comeback plan - Without an effective comeback plan, the damage caused by threats can be devastating. To develop an essential comeback plan, you can upgrade your software, activate security prompts, and improve your protection policies.
Pick a Disaster Recovery Policy
Every business is different, so while one disaster recovery policy may work for one business, it might not work for another company. Based on the prior steps and your budget, you can choose various types of disaster recovery policies.
Create Your Playbook
Every disaster recovery policy must have a playbook for every service and a step-by-step guide based on the type of disaster recovery policy chosen. A playbook will include essential information that may include the following:
- Employee contact information and their designated service
- Guides with essential information such as passwords, access codes, and information collected during the business impact analysis.
- Contact information for the lead in charge after a disaster has occurred.
- Contact information for third-party resources. If you have a third-party resource involved, you’ll want to have their contact information and how you can implement their services.
- Emergency Responder contact information.
- Manager contact information.
- Access codes to recovery websites and play-by-play of your IT infrastructure.
Test Your Disaster Recovery Policy
When you get to test your disaster recovery policy, your policy should be ready to go. An excellent disaster recovery policy is determined by how well it performs during testing. Testing your disaster recovery policy can be a complex and time-consuming task, but it's well worth it.
There are several ways how you can test your disaster recovery policy which might include:
- Read over the policy - During the first part of testing, you’ll want to sit down with your team of experts and perform a walk-through. During the walk-through, your team can make any needed updates or corrections to the policy.
- Disaster drill - Next, you can create a disaster drill to see how well your disaster recovery policy performs. During a disaster drill, your business operations will not be affected in any way.
- Interruption scenario - During an interruption scenario, your disaster recovery policy will be tested as if all systems are completely down. During an interruption system, all systems will have to go offline briefly.
Similar to all testing procedures, you should carry out the testing of your disaster recovery policy in increments so you don’t affect the daily operations of your business. To determine if your policy passed or failed, you’ll use success metrics.
A successful disaster recovery policy is determined by its ability to run without errors, flaws found during testing, and how they're fixed.
Set Up Employee Awareness Plans
The final way you can implement a disaster recovery policy is to set up employee awareness plans. Aside from testing, you should have your Human Resources department conduct an employee awareness plan. For those who control the disaster recovery policy, they should be aware of different scenarios.
An employee awareness plan should have their contact information, along with their responsibilities, in case of a disaster. Discovery recovery tests should be conducted in increments to test several scenarios.
When there’s a panic in the workplace, you should have a team of experts in place and ready to react at a moment's notice. With your disaster recovery policy, you can swiftly gather information such as contact information and system recovery time during an outage.
These ways can help you execute one of the best disaster recovery policies. To ensure you've covered every area, you can also keep a checklist. An excellent disaster recovery policy focuses on how well your business can manage a threat and how well it restores its functions and communication.
Disaster Recovery Policy: FAQ
1. What is a disaster recovery policy?
A disaster recovery policy creates a detailed map of how to get back to regular business operations and how to salvage essential information. It acts as a guide for employees after a disaster occurs.
2. What are the four basic steps in a disaster recovery policy?
The four basic steps in a disaster recovery policy are to create a team, set recovery time objectives, develop a blueprint of your IT infrastructure, and choose your type of disaster recovery policy.