What is disaster recovery planning?

Disaster recovery planning, disaster recovery plan or disaster recovery plan is a corporate policy or process that is intended to help an organization respond to potential disasters in a flexible and expeditious manner by recovering the corporate IT infrastructure.

It is important that in the context of disaster recovery planning, all stakeholders are aware of the steps to be taken. The potential disaster that the recovery plan envisages could be anything from natural disasters, to equipment failure, to man-made accidents, to deliberate hacking attacks, etc.

Disaster recovery planning in steps

  • The first step in disaster recovery planning should be Business Impact Analysisduring which your team will, among other things, assess IT priorities and recovery time objectives, and schedule a technology recovery strategy for application, hardware and data recovery. As part of this step, you should identify potential risks and threats that could jeopardize IT and company operations.
  • Subsequently, it is important to determine, which systems, data and processes are most important for the day-to-day operations of the company. This allows you to prioritize recovery and determine how quickly it should be restored.
  • On the basis of the identified risks and important elements, a specific planthat describes the process, steps and responsibilities of each team member.
  • It is not enough to just create and have a recovery plan. You should test and train regularly both to check its effectiveness and timeliness and to ensure that everyone in the team knows what to do within the process. Of course, the recovery plan should be updated regularly to reflect changes in IT infrastructure, technology and risk.

Disaster recovery planning is a key step for minimising potential damage caused by the disaster. Among other things, it ensures that your business will be able to get back up and running quickly after an unexpected incident. It's an integral part of strategic IT and company-wide management.