Why is Disaster Recovery Important for Businesses?

Disaster recovery for your business is a critical process that ensures your company can quickly and efficiently recover from any unforeseen disaster, whether natural or man-made. Businesses face various threats, including environmental disasters and cyber-attacks, which could lead to significant disruptions and financial losses.

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented process that outlines the necessary steps to be taken in case of a disaster, including preventive measures and recovery strategies.

Discover the benefits of disaster recovery planning for your business and explore the critical components of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan, and Why is it Important?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) includes a set of policies, procedures, and actions that are put in place to minimize the impact of an unexpected event or disaster, such as a cyber-attack, natural disaster, or system failure. The plan outlines an organization’s steps to ensure its critical business functions can continue during a disaster.

A well-designed Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan or DRP enables businesses to protect their employees, data, and physical assets, maintain customer service levels, and minimize financial losses.

The consequences of not having a BCDR plan can be severe. Organizations can suffer significant financial losses, damage to their reputation, loss of customers, and even bankruptcy. Without a plan, businesses may be unable to recover critical data, systems, and applications, which can cause extended downtime, disruption to business operations, and loss of revenue. In the worst-case scenario, a business may not recover at all.

Reasons You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters and unexpected events can happen to any organization, regardless of size or industry. A DRP can help minimize the impact of such incidents. Some reasons you need a DRP include the following:

Permanent Data Loss

Data loss can occur because of hardware failure, software corruption, or cyber-attacks. Without a DRP, you risk losing vital data that could be critical to your business operations, including customer demographics, product performance metrics, sales data, and internal business processes. A DRP ensures data is backed up regularly and stored in an off-site location so it can be restored quickly in a disaster.

Human Error

Human errors can lead to devastating consequences for businesses, whether a mistake made by an employee, an IT professional, or a third-party vendor. For example, accidentally deleting critical files, misconfiguring servers, or failing to update software can cause data loss and service outages.

A DRP can mitigate the risk of human error by outlining clear recovery procedures that are easy to follow. It can also help businesses identify and address potential human error risks and ensure quick recovery in such incidents.

Customer Loss

If customers cannot access the products or services they require, they may switch to a competitor, resulting in lost revenue and a damaged reputation. With a DRP, businesses can restore services quickly, maintain customer satisfaction, and prevent revenue loss because of customer churn.

Broad Range of Threats

Organizations face many threats, including citywide power outages, earthquakes, storms, and cyber-criminals. A DRP can help organizations identify potential threats, develop a response plan, and implement proactive measures to mitigate risks. This includes having off-site backups, secure data storage, and regular testing and simulation of potential disaster scenarios.

Downtime Costs

Prolonged downtime can be expensive, costing businesses $5,600 per minute on average. A DRP can help businesses restore services, data, and systems quickly and maintain customer trust by being transparent and proactive about any incidents that may affect them.

What Makes an Effective BCDR Plan?

An effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan should include a thorough risk assessment, a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy, and a detailed plan for maintaining critical business functions during interruptions. It should also have a plan for recovering IT systems and infrastructure after a disaster and training and awareness for employees on their roles and responsibilities during a disaster.

Each member of the organization should have clearly defined roles and responsibilities during a disaster or other disruptive event. This includes identifying the decision-makers, ensuring that all personnel know the plan and their responsibilities, and providing ongoing training and support.

Effective communication is also essential during a disaster. The communication plan should identify key stakeholders, define communication channels, and establish protocols for disseminating information to employees, customers, and other relevant parties.

Regular testing is necessary to ensure the BCDR plan is effective and up-to-date. This includes conducting periodic drills and simulations to test the plan’s effectiveness, identifying potential areas for improvement, and making necessary adjustments accordingly. Regular testing also helps ensure all employees know the plan and their roles and responsibilities.

How Does a BCDR Plan Work? Recovery Plan Considerations

When it comes to implementing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan, there are several crucial considerations to keep in mind:

• The extent of the plan: The recovery plan must be comprehensive and tailored to the organization’s needs, taking into account its size, complexity, and critical business functions. The plan should cover all potential scenarios that may cause disruptions and detail the steps needed to recover.
• Types of threats to prepare for: Organizations need to consider the various threats that can cause a disaster, including natural disasters, cyber-attacks, human error, and equipment failures. Each threat type requires a specific response strategy and recovery plan, and organizations must prepare for all possible scenarios.
• Budget and resources: Creating an effective recovery plan requires time, money, and resources. The organization must assess its budget and available resources to ensure that it can implement the plan effectively. A realistic budget is essential to ensure the plan can be adequately implemented and maintained.
• Technology infrastructure: A critical factor when creating a recovery plan is the technology infrastructure needed to support it. The plan must identify the hardware, software, and network components critical to business operations and outline a plan for their recovery.
• Stakeholder communication: Effective communication is critical to ensuring a quick and effective response during a disaster. The recovery plan should detail the communication channels and protocols needed to keep stakeholders informed throughout the recovery process. This includes employees, customers, vendors, and other relevant parties.

At National Technology Management, we follow a comprehensive approach in our BCDR plan implementation to ensure the protection of clients’ critical data and systems in case of any disaster or disruption. The plan includes physical production machines and virtual infrastructure, with data backed up every five minutes and replicated off-site every hour.

Backups are also verified through screenshots and application verification, and ransomware detection is in place to detect potential attacks. In the event of a disaster, clients can restore their data from the cloud or a local appliance using our fast failback feature, which employs a Rescue Agent. The failback also rebuilds your system from the ground up with a continuously-mirrored bare metal restore.

Rapid rollback avoids reformatting or re-partitioning by allowing incremental reversion to a previously backed-up state. Meanwhile, instant virtualization minimizes downtime after an outage or attack with local or cloud-based virtualization.

Our BCDR plan also features two-factor authentication to secure the backup solution and prevent ransomware attacks from corrupting data. The secure cloud backup is GDPR and SOC 2 compliant with cloud infrastructure replicated at diverse geolocations, enabling fast and secure disaster recovery.

Protect Your Business With National Technology Management

Unexpected events can happen to your business at any time. That’s why it’s crucial to have a robust disaster recovery plan to protect your business from potential disasters.

National Technology Management offers a comprehensive and reliable solution to help your organization quickly recover from disasters and minimize downtime, ensuring business continuity. Our proactive approach ensures your business is safeguarded with a reliable DRP, giving you peace of mind and allowing you to focus on your business goals.

Contact National Technology Management today to implement disaster recovery for your business and ensure you are prepared for potential disasters.