Disasters can strike at any time and can have a devastating impact on businesses, causing significant downtime and financial loss. Having a well-planned and well-executed disaster recovery plan checklist is essential to ensuring that your business can…
A disaster recovery (DR) plan checklist is a document that outlines the key steps and procedures for recovering critical systems and data in the event of a disaster. The checklist provides a comprehensive and organized approach to ensure that all necessary steps are taken to protect your organization’s data and operations.
The sample checklist we’ve created below is meant to serve as a useful tool to help ensure your DR plan is comprehensive and…
Keep in mind, however, that the specific items included in a DR plan checklist will vary based on the needs and risks of each individual organization.
Based on the criticality of the systems and data, determine the maximum tolerable downtime or Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the maximum acceptable data loss or Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for each system. It’s important to set realistic targets that are achievable with your current infrastructure.
Make a list that encompasses all of the systems, data, and applications that are critical to your organization’s operations. This includes narrowing down the minimum level of system availability and data integrity that is required to support business operations.
Develop procedures for backing up critical systems and data, as well as procedures for recovering them in the event of a disaster. Based on the RTO and RPO targets, plan and implement backup and recovery solutions that meet your requirements. This may involve investing in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions such as cloud backup, data replication, and high availability solutions.
Incident response and management is critical in helping organizations quickly respond to and effectively handle sudden and unexpected business interruptions. Create and write down procedures for responding to and managing potential incidents, as well as identifying the individuals responsible for coordinating each response.
Determine who within your organization should be on your disaster recovery team and clearly define their role and responsibilities for each type of potential disaster. This is a key piece within the DR plan checklist because it gives peace of mind that your team members are prepared to quickly respond in a well-organized fashion. Otherwise, there may be confusion surrounding who does what and when, which could impact business continuity during an already stressful event.
Provide information about the DR plan to employees, define their roles in its implementation, and offer effective awareness training. Team members who are properly trained on all aspects of your DR plan have a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and regular training sessions and discussions may help uncover potential weaknesses or deficiencies within the plan itself that need to be addressed.
Making sure everyone within your organization knows how to communicate about disasters is critical. Create a crisis communication plan that outlines how to communicate with employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders in the event of a disaster. Also define who in leadership should provide answers to the public and press.
Identify and secure alternate locations for critical systems and data in the event of a disaster, i.e. utilize cloud vs on-premises or a third-party data center. When selecting a physical DR site, consider the following:
Always plan for failback (how to move operations from a temporary site back to its primary site) as a part of your DR plan. Without a failback plan, your team may encounter avoidable errors, crucial data loss, or even major delays when moving back to your organization’s primary systems.
Your failback plan should include the steps and procedures for:
Keep an eye on the failback process to ensure that it runs smoothly, and any systems, applications, and infrastructure are properly restored and functioning normally after failback has been completed. Throughout the process, keep careful notes and highlight any areas for improvement to lessen the risk of errors and minimize downtime as operations are moved back to their primary sites.
Ensure that key supplier and vendor partnerships also include clearly defined DR procedures. These procedures should address interdependencies plus monitoring and disaster recovery testing to minimize downtime in the event of a disaster.
Prevention and preparation are key to ensuring full recovery after a disruption. Regularly conducting disaster recovery testing and validating your unique DR plan lets you know whether or not:
Factors like business environments, risks, security threats, and compliance requirements change, some more quickly than others. With that, your DR plan cannot remain static. In addition to scheduling routine tests, it’s mission-critical to review and update your organization’s DR plan on an ongoing basis to make sure it stays rock solid, especially as new security threats take form. Afterall, a procedure that may have worked a few months ago may no longer be effective against emerging risks.
So, be sure to assess and update your DR plan as needed to maintain your organization’s DR capabilities and decrease the impact of any potential disasters.
Using a DR expert can help in several ways to improve DR planning and protect your data:
Developing and testing a strong DR plan can be difficult, not to mention stressful. Leaving out one crucial piece or forgetting to include one potential scenario could hinder your business continuity plans and lead to extensive financial losses and a poor brand reputation. At TierPoint, our disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS) offerings, among others, can help you build and facilitate a DR plan that maintains resiliency for your mission-critical data, operations, applications, and overall IT infrastructure.
If you’re interested in learning how to prevent and overcome business continuity challenges, download our Ultimate Guide to Running Your Business Through Uncertainty and Disruption or contact us here.