If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with enterprise customers on their cyber resilience postures, it’s this: Downtime caused by disasters can be costly, and every organization should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place.
Today, I’m outlining 12 best practices to consider when developing and reviewing your organization’s DR plan to minimize downtime, risk, and unexpected costs in the face of unexpected events.
These key considerations will help your IT team when developing and reviewing a disaster recovery plan.
1. Leave no disaster unidentified
The first step in building a strong DR plan is to identify all potential threats, not just major disasters. Consider “minor” threats like human error or hardware failures that could disrupt security and operations.
2. Plan for the worst (and beyond)
While it’s important to plan for likely threats like ransomware attacks, don’t neglect worst-case scenarios. Develop a plan that can handle a catastrophic event like a natural disaster wiping out your primary site or a widespread communication outage.
3. Ransomware: Your uninvited guest
Ransomware attacks are a major threat. Dedicate a significant portion of your DR plan to addressing ransomware scenarios, including recovery procedures and strategies to minimize the impact of such attacks.
4. Beyond the walls: Cloud catastrophe
Extend your DR plan beyond on-premises threats to include potential disruptions associated with cloud services, such as outages or security breaches. It may seem counterintuitive that we, a cloud provider, are the ones to call this out, but we’re big proponents of the tenet that the one truth about technology is that it will fail. Multi-cloud and hybrid disaster recovery options help reduce the risk of those rare, but highly impactful outages. Cloud provider service level agreements (SLAs) define availability targets (e.g., 99.9% uptime) which can increase your overall data and application availability above on-premises capabilities.
5. Infrastructure independence
Always anticipate potential infrastructure unavailability during a disaster. Plan alternative methods for accessing critical data and systems, including leveraging hot cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions as a backup.
6. Think beyond data recovery
A robust DR plan goes beyond just recovering data. It should outline procedures for rebuilding your entire IT environment, including applications, configurations, security, and user accounts. There’s a big gap between restoring data and actual recovery.
7. Plan variations
Develop different versions of your DR plan based on the severity of the incident and the types of incidents your business is most likely to face. This allows for a more targeted response, depending on the specific nature of the disruption.
8. Runbooks: Your DR roadmap
Consider creating predefined “runbooks” that outline specific steps for various disaster scenarios. These detailed documents provide clear instructions for IT staff during a crisis.
9. Recovery is a sprint, but DR planning is a marathon
Modern DR strategies prioritize planning for recovery from the beginning. Verify the usability of your backups and recovered data to ensure their effectiveness during a crisis. Test your restoration procedures regularly to avoid the pitfall of unusable backups during a disaster.
10. Securing resources in advance
Don’t wait for disaster to strike before securing necessary resources. Budgetary approvals, software licenses, and hardware procurement should all be addressed in advance to avoid delays during a crisis.
11. Cyber insurance considerations
If your business has cyber insurance, familiarize yourself with the DR planning requirements outlined in the policy. Understanding the insurance company’s expectations can help you tailor your DR strategy accordingly.
12. Backups are essential, but they’re not the whole plan
As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, they often target backups as well. Backups—once a low-priority just-in-case item—are now mission critical. Backups are a critical foundation for your DR plan, but they are not the entire plan.
A closing note on recovery
Finally, make sure to regularly test and update your DR plan to ensure it remains effective and up to date. By leveraging affordable, secure, cloud-based backup and archive as part of your overall disaster recovery strategy, you can better protect your critical data. The result will minimize downtime, risk, and costs in the face of unexpected events.
