Organizations must protect their IT environments from various external and internal risks. Threat actors and cybercriminals pose a serious and omnipresent danger with ransomware and other destructive malware variants that can damage business-critical systems. Employees can inadvertently delete data or make changes that cause systems to crash. Companies cannot afford extended outages in today’s ultra-competitive market.
Businesses must develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan (DRP) to protect their valuable IT resources. Teams must be able to recover vital systems in a disaster quickly and efficiently. Companies should create a disaster recovery plan that addresses all their essential internal and customer-facing systems and applications. The goal is to minimize the impact of a disaster on business operations and customer satisfaction.
Your company should adopt the following best practices and strategies when developing disaster recovery plans.
Define the Recovery Scope and Objectives
The first step in developing a viable DRP is to define the recovery’s scope. Companies typically have identified a subset of their IT environment which is essential to business operations. Business leaders must ensure that they include these systems in the recovery plan. Test and development systems might not need to be recovered and can be excluded from the DRP.
The IT team may not know which systems are crucial to operations. Business groups across the company should be consulted to identify all vital systems. The recovery must focus on several objectives, including:
- Maintaining critical internal and external services and operations;
- Minimizing financial losses;
- Protecting data resources and the IT infrastructure;
- Ensuring regulatory compliance.
Once the scope has been defined, the identified systems must be prioritized for recovery, with the most essential systems receiving priority. Teams must understand any dependencies that may impact the order of recovery activities. All systems in the plan should have recovery time and recovery point objectives defined by business leaders.
Perform a Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis
An organization should conduct a risk assessment to evaluate threats to the IT environment and business. Different threats may trigger alternative recovery plans based on their severity. Threats to consider include:
- Natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes;
- Cyberattacks such as ransomware or denial of service (DDoS) attacks;
- Human errors or insider threats resulting in data loss;
- Power failures;
- Faulty software updates or hardware failures.
The DRP should have provisions to deal with each type of threat. Natural disasters or widespread power outages will usually require the execution of the complete recovery plan. Teams recovering from a targeted cyberattack that affects a business-critical system only need to execute the appropriate part of the plan.
Decision-makers must perform a business impact analysis (BIA) to evaluate how a disaster will affect the business. The analysis should include identifying the systems critical to business operations and dependencies that teams need to incorporate into recovery procedures. Teams must define two key metrics for every mission-critical system.
- Recovery time objective (RTO) – The RTO defines the maximum recovery time for a specific system. An RTO of 24 hours means the teams must recover the system in 24 hours or less.
- Recovery point objective (RPO) – The RPO defines the maximum amount of data a company can lose when recovering a system. RPOs are dependent on a company’s backup strategy. For example, if the RPO is six hours, then backups must be performed every six hours to ensure fresh data is available for the recovery.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
The plan must define the roles and responsibilities that individuals and teams will have in a disaster. Everyone involved in disaster recovery must understand what to do and when to take action. All participants in the plan should have their contact information included.
The following key roles and responsibilities should be outlined in the DRP.
- Disaster recovery coordinator – The coordinator manages the recovery team, oversees plan creation and maintenance, schedules tests, and reports recovery status to business leaders and stakeholders.
- Senior management sponsor – This person aligns recovery processes with business priorities, communicates management decisions during a disaster, and approves and funds the plan.
- Recovery team – This team comprises the subject matter experts (SMEs) and technicians who will perform the recovery. It includes personnel responsible for restoring backups, rebuilding systems, and ensuring the integrity of restored applications. The team should maintain updated documentation to streamline the recovery.
- Business continuity team – This team coordinates the recovery of business processes across affected departments. They may provide employees with manual processes to maintain operations during recovery. The team should include representatives from all departments that a disaster may impact.
Implement Backup and Recovery Strategies
Companies should implement backup and recovery strategies that align with the DRP’s objectives. They must have the appropriate tools and processes to meet system RTOs and RPOs. Meeting the objectives may entail multiple backup schedules to optimize storage while addressing recovery requirements. Businesses must keep at least one backup copy off-site to protect against physical disasters.
Test and Update the Plan
Teams must test the plan regularly to ensure its ability to meet recovery objectives. The plan coordinator should modify documentation to address test results and improve recovery capabilities. The DR coordinator and recovery teams must update the plan to incorporate new systems or business processes.
VAST’s Role in Your Disaster Recovery Planning
VAST has services that streamline your backup and recovery processes to prepare you for a disaster. We can provide an efficient backup and recovery solution that you can integrate into your DRP. Our team can help your company plan and implement a reliable disaster recovery strategy.
VAST’s Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) offering provides a fully managed backup solution aligned with your business strategy. CBaaS eliminates the need to construct and maintain a backup infrastructure and is built on advanced data backup and protection technology.
Our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) leverages the power and flexibility of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to provide scalable, cost-effective application recovery. Our solution supports recovering on-premises and cloud infrastructures and minimizes downtime with fast and accurate data recovery.
Contact our disaster recovery experts and let us help you protect your business and solidify your DRP.
