Building a Disaster IT Recovery Plan (DRP)

May 18, 2021

The First Steps to Peace of Mind

When it comes to disaster in the workplace, there’s no way to know what may strike or exactly how your information technology may be impacted. However, with a thoughtful approach to disaster planning, you’ll know that you’re well-prepared should something happen to your IT infrastructure, your physical space or both. Follow these initial steps to give yourself peace of mind, should your business encounter disaster.

Identify Threats

Make a list of potential disasters that might affect your business – everything from weather catastrophes common in your area to mundane problems like power outage, hardware failure and data loss. Starting with your highest-risk scenario, identify what assets are in danger. What is the impact of a potential loss? Let value guide your recovery plan’s development.

Predict Effects to Define Solutions

For each potential disaster you’ve identified, how will each business area be affected? Each department will have different needs (sales, accounting, customer service, marketing, human resources) and some downed resources will be universal (email access, local network files, etc.). What accommodations need to be made to get systems up and running again?

Evaluate Your Downtime Tolerance

How long can your business survive without IT resources? Some areas may require IT infrastructure for minute-to-minute functioning, while others can cope with impairment for hours or even days. Examine the potential impact on your services and the true cost of downtime in order to prioritize recovery solutions.

​​​​​​​Develop Solutions

Build any safety nets and redundancies necessary for your systems to function properly when disaster does strike. In this stage, an outside eye can be helpful in recommending optimal technologies to meet your unique needs. Disaster recovery technologies include backup servers and network traffic switches, uninterrupted power supplies, and disk or tape backup. Migrating functions to the cloud-enable your IT to work from anywhere, should the worst happen.

Prepare Employees

Make sure your employees are trained and empowered to actually carry out the recovery plan by establishing clear roles and responsibilities. Train each team member to execute their part of the plan. Use training and dry runs to ensure plans are realistic and feasible.