Disaster recovery plan: A comprehensive planning guide

What is disaster recovery planning?

Disaster recovery planning involves preparing and implementing strategies to protect and restore an organization’s IT infrastructure and data after disruptive events, such as natural disasters, power outages, or cyberattacks, including ransomware.

At the heart of disaster recovery planning is the concept of business continuity. This ensures that critical functions can continue during and after a disruption. Additionally, disaster recovery planning incorporates strategies that enhance cyber resilience, helping organizations withstand and recover from cyber threats while maintaining essential operations.

To build a robust disaster recovery plan that effectively protects an organization’s critical systems and data, key foundational concepts must be included in the plan:

• Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs): The maximum acceptable time after a disaster occurs before operations return to normal.
• Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs): The maximum acceptable time between a disaster in which data is lost or corrupted and the last backup, snapshot, or data sync executed before harm is done to the business.
• Data Protection and Backup Strategy: A robust backup solution that meets your organization’s specific needs is crucial. Consider cloud-based solutions, on-premises backups, or hybrid approaches to provide flexibility and reliability and, most importantly, back up often. Integrating your data protection strategy with your disaster recovery plan includes maintaining clear documentation of procedures and continuously assessing and improving your strategy to adapt to evolving threats and business needs. This comprehensive approach enhances resilience against data loss.
• Testing and Verification: Regularly test your backups to confirm that data can be successfully restored. Verification processes will help identify any potential issues with your backup strategy before a crisis occurs.

The best disaster recovery plans will include detailed roles and instructions for all stakeholders that will specify what processes, in what order they should follow, and what technologies should be deployed to minimize downtime.

Automation is a significant element of disaster recovery planning, helping businesses respond more swiftly and effectively to incidents.

How to create and write a disaster recovery plan?

Before any organization can create a disaster recovery plan, it must take a detailed inventory of all the people, processes, and technologies in IT operations. An exhaustive audit is required, or the plan will not be effective.

After that, there are several steps involved in putting together a comprehensive and effective plan, including:

Step 1: Assess potential risks
What sorts of incidents could threaten the business? Identify and assign probabilities to these risks, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, system failures, and rogue employees.

Step 2: Analyze the business impact of risks
Assess which workflows are essential for operations and the potential impact of disruption to its critical functions. Prioritize business functions based on their criticality to your organization. You should evaluate the potential financial, operational, and reputational effects.

Step 3: Establish recovery objectives
Define the RTO and RPO for each critical function. Establish how quickly they need to be restored and define the maximum acceptable amount of data loss. This will define how often backups should be done.

Step 4: Develop recovery strategies
This plan will include your strategy for restoring applications and processes to normal operations after managing the immediate threat. Its goal is to ensure business continuity and minimize disruption. The focus should be restoring IT infrastructure, data, and business operations once the situation stabilizes. This strategy will also include actions that need to be taken, such as executing recovery procedures, including data restoration and system reconfiguration, implementing backup solutions to recover data, and assessing RPO and RTO.
Note: Recovery strategies typically follow the response phase, which happens within minutes to hours of an incident and focuses on safety and containment of the disruptive event. This can include identifying the event, assessing the impact, and implementing emergency protocols.

Step 5: Document the plan
Carefully document all disaster recovery processes, making sure to make clear when one action is contingent upon another being successfully completed. Include all key contacts, including disaster recovery team members, vendors, and stakeholders. Ensure you detail step-by-step recovery strategies and share the communication plan during the disaster.

Step 6: Test the plan
Regularly and continuously test the disaster recovery plan to make sure it is effective and updated as necessary. Ensure that everyone involved is sufficiently trained and understands their roles.

Step 7: Keep the plan current
Continuously review and update the disaster recovery plan in response to any alterations to the organization’s technology, business environment, and operations.

How to test a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is not a set-it-and-forget-it IT task. It must be regularly tested to make sure it will work when needed. Testing the disaster recovery plan ensures systems can be restored as rapidly as possible in worst-case scenarios.

There are many ways to test a plan. Ideally, teams go through exercises that simulate different kinds of disasters. But the exercises themselves can vary from rather abstract to very hands-on.

• Tabletop exercises – Discussion-based rather than action-based, these sessions involve the team “talking” through the plan step by step to discuss how they would each respond to a hypothetical disaster scenario.
• Walk-through tests – This exercise has team members physically act out their roles and responsibilities in the plan. Critical actions can include deploying emergency equipment or contacting emergency personnel.
• Simulation tests – With this kind of test, organizations create a realistic disaster scenario and ask their teams to respond as if to an actual event. This can include shutting down systems, switching to backup systems, and using alternative communication channels.
• Full interruption tests – This is the most extreme and comprehensive test. Organizations shut down primary systems completely. Their teams are then tasked with responding as if a disaster occurred. This is as close to a real disaster or cyber threat scenario as possible and can provide the most accurate assessment of a plan’s effectiveness.