IT disaster recovery planning is essential for maintaining business continuity. This article highlights some best practices to consider.

The foundation of an effective IT disaster recovery plan is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). A BIA helps you identify the most critical business functions and the acceptable downtime and data loss for each. The BIA informs you which recovery efforts to prioritise and where to allocate resources.

This analysis typically involves:

 Identifying critical IT functions within your business
 Impact assessment – For each critical IT function, assess the potential consequences of disruption. Consider factors like financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory compliance risks.
 Determining downtime and data loss tolerance – Establish the acceptable amount of downtime for each critical IT function and the maximum amount of acceptable data loss for each critical function.

Ask the questions: How long can your business afford a particular function to be offline before experiencing significant negative impacts? How much data can you tolerate losing in the event of a disaster?

By completing a BIA, you gain valuable insights that guide the development of your IT disaster recovery plan. You will know which IT systems and data require the most robust recovery strategies.

Next steps

Once you have completed a BIA, create an inventory, and organise it properly as applicable. For more information on compiling a register for your IT assets, click here.

It is important to know the exact locations of your server rooms and network operation centres. Make sure you know where to find critical equipment like power supply units, routers, and switches.

Maintaining your recovery plan

Although IT disaster recovery planning involves certain crucial initial steps in establishing the plan, it is just as important to continuously evaluate and update your disaster recovery process to ensure it remains effective and up to date. Involve your employees in the process by training them on the disaster recovery plan and their roles in executing it.

Furthermore, regularly test your disaster recovery strategy to ensure it works as intended when needed.

Regularly backing up data and replicating it to a secure offsite location (e.g. backing up on a cloud) will help in fast recovery in the event of an IT disaster.