What will you do if your server fails, ransomware strikes or the office burns down? Without a prepared plan, recovery drags on for days and sometimes does not succeed at all. A disaster recovery plan is exactly what gets a company through the worst. Let us explain what it contains.

What disaster recovery is

Disaster recovery is a plan for how to restore IT and operations after a disaster. A disaster can be a power outage, a cyberattack, a fire, a hardware failure, or even an ordinary human error. The plan determines in advance what to do, in what order and who is responsible for what.

Why a company needs it

Every hour of downtime costs money and damages customer trust. Without a plan, decisions during a disaster are made in panic, recovery takes a long time and it often turns out a key backup is missing. With a plan, recovery is fast and predictable.

Key terms: RTO and RPO

Two terms the whole plan rests on:

  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is how long recovery may take, that is by when the company must be functional again.
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is how much data you can afford to lose, that is how often you need to back up.

The whole solution is designed around these two numbers. The shorter the times, the more robust (and expensive) the protection.

What the plan consists of

  • Reliable backups following the 3-2-1 rule, off-site and above all tested.
  • Power redundancy via a UPS and an ATS.
  • Documentation and contacts, so that during an outage you know who to call and what to start.
  • Step-by-step procedures, who does what and in what order.

The most common scenarios

The plan should cover what really threatens: ransomware, a disk or server failure, a power outage, human error and device theft.

Most important: test the recovery

This is the most underestimated. A backup you have never tried to restore is not a backup. Regularly verify that the data can actually be recovered and that the procedures work. Otherwise the truth shows only when it is too late. This relates to the article on backing up.

Want your company ready for the worst? Get in touch, we will design a recovery plan and test it as part of IT support for companies.

This article is part of our Business IT overview.