Seven Steps To Create An Effective Disaster Recovery Plan
Uploaded on 2021-07-12 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW
All IT and senior management need an effective Cyber Disaster Plan to reduce the chances of a cyber attack, criminal hack or ransomware demand. An effective disaster recovery plan should include identifying critical IT systems and networks, highlighting the recovery time objectives, and outlining the steps needed to restart and recover the systems and networks. End-to-end cyber security solutions provider Quorum have identified seven critical steps an organisation that assists with IT systems recovery. They will also help in creating a disaster recovery plan so you can ensure that your organisation is protected against a worst-case scenario.
1. Central to this process is identifying all critical applications and servers that need to be backed up: Be thorough, exclude nothing and don’t assume that you know what is best for your users. Make sure to include ancillary systems like domain servers, as well as other network equipment, circuits and locations.
2. This is where you define key targets like recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), two important but often misunderstood terms: Your RTO refers to the maximum time a server, application or system can be down before it results in unacceptable damage to the business. Your RPO refers to the maximum acceptable age of the backup files that are to be used during a disaster recovery incident. This number tells you how often your data must be backed up.
3. In an emergency, it is critical for everyone to know their role in advance.
4. Regularly updating your plan is as critical as creating it: Your plan should be revisited and updated every time you test your DR system, change infrastructure and/or key personnel, any time an employee involved in the plan leaves the organisation or a new employee is hired who will have a roll in the plan going forward.
5. Modern technology has changed that, making it easy to perform realistic tests with little to no disruption to your business’ function: Businesses in different vertic als will have different best practices when it comes to test schedules. However, a good rule of thumb is to do a partial test monthly and a full at least once per year.
6. What parts of the process (including software and other DR solutions) could be improved to make your DR process faster, more reliable, more efficient, or easier to perform?
7. Now it’s time to evaluate whether you have the ideal disaster recovery solution in place and does it meet all the correct organisational needs.
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