Disaster recovery plan planning and implementation

Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place to effectively deal with pandemics, floods, fires, cybersecurity attacks, etc? Multiple things can go wrong when incidents unfold in an unexpected way.

For example, if a cyberattack halts your business operations, how would you quickly restore your IT processes and ensure business continuity?

A well-thought-out Business Continuity plan helps you maintain business functions or revive your business in the event of major disruptions. It outlines processes that you must follow when something has a devastating impact on your business.

Whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation, your success largely depends on your ability to stay competitive during adverse circumstances.

Increased customer confidence, a company’s reputation, and market value are three of the major benefits of designing an effective business continuity plan.

What Should be the First Step?

Work on fundamentals. Ask yourself the following questions to bring clarity to your vision and define the BCP implementation project:

1) What are the systems we are running?
2) How does the systems’ downtime impact our business operations?
3) How much money will our company lose, in case this system goes down?

And then, using the answers from the previous 3 questions, answer:

4) What are the KPI values our solution needs to meet?
5) What are the essential tools I need to support my strategy?

Thoroughly answer these questions as your first step toward designing a spot-on business continuity plan.
From the anticipated money loss, you’ll be able to figure out the DR project budget.

To define your criteria of success, you need to identify your KPIs. Some of the notable KPIs include:

• Recovery Point Objective
• Recovery Time Objective
• Recovery Window
• System Redundancy

Then, from the KPI values, you’ll be able to decide on the tools you want to use.

So, as you probably noticed, KPIs are the essential bullet here. If you haven’t yet documented KPIs for your disaster recovery solution, it’s high time to do so. I’ll talk more about tools and processes soon.