How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Business

In a new white paper, Flexential outlines five basic steps for creating a robust, reliable and tested disaster recovery plan that’s tailored to your business.

In a world where even a single minute of downtime can negatively impact your business’ reputation, having a tested and reliable disaster recovery (DR) plan for your business is an essential, according to a new white paper from Flexential. To help IT leaders create a strategy that fits their unique business, the paper outlines five basic steps to ensure your data and systems are protected.

First, Flexential recommends that IT leaders conduct a business impact assessment to “understand how systems and data relate to your business’ success.” They propose a three-part process that identifies, prioritizes, and clarifies your business’ unique needs.

While cyberattacks and catastrophic natural disasters are the threats that get the most attention, there are a number of other events that can precipitate a crisis, from sudden business disruptions or organizational changes to malware and ransomware, human error and simple equipment failure. – Flexential, “The IT Leader’s Ultimate Guide to Building a Disaster Recovery Strategy“

Second, the paper outlines how to define your recovery time objective (RTO), also known as downtime, and your recovery point objectives (RPO), which Flexential says is “the point in the past to which you need to revert when activating your DR site.”

The third step IT leaders should take revolves around selecting the right technology to support your plan. The paper discusses the pros and cos of traditional backups and real-time replication.

Flexential says, “once you have assessed the business impact, determined the best technology to support your DR strategy and defined the RTO and RPO strategy for your IT infrastructure, the next step is to build that structure.” They compare DIY and DRaaS, two different approaches to building a DR structure, in step four.

Finally, the paper discusses the importance of testing and evolving your disaster recovery plan. They note that “the worst time to discover your plan is outdated, inadequate or nonfunctional is during an actual disaster.”

Download the full report to learn more about how to design a reliable disaster recovery plan for your organization.