Many organisations and communities were impacted by tropical cyclones last summer with 3,086 in Queensland alone. Such disasters underscore the importance of preparedness to bounce back faster. They are also opportunities to develop and refine disaster recovery strategies, so businesses can better handle future disruptions.
Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Strategy
With a well-crafted disaster recovery plan, Brisbane and Townsville businesses can quickly restore critical operations, minimise downtime, and build customer trust. Preparing ahead also helps to safeguard assets, protect data, and ensure business continuity.
In addition, having a robust plan in place can enhance your business’ reputation, especially in terms of reliability and resilience. This can give you a competitive edge in the market.
The ability to quickly respond to and recover from disasters can be a game-changer. So, how do you build a disaster recovery plan?
1. Conduct a Risk Assessment
Begin by identifying potential threats that could impact your business, such as:
- Natural disasters like cyclones, floods, and bushfires
- Operational risks like supply chain disruptions and cyber security threats
By listing all possible threats, you can start to understand the scope of what you need to prepare for. Then, evaluate how each threat could affect your critical business functions. Think about the worst-case scenarios and the potential downtime. Prioritise risks based on their likelihood and severity, so you can focus on the most significant threats first. This can help you allocate resources better and ensure that your most critical functions are safe.
2. Craft a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is key to understanding the effects of disruptions on your operations. Which functions are vital? For example, if you run an e-commerce site, payment processing system is critical.
Determine the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for each critical function. This will help you see how quickly you need to restore these functions and how much data loss is acceptable.
Knowing the dependencies between different systems and processes is also important. For instance, your customer service operations might depend on your IT infrastructure.
Another vital step is assessing the financial impact of downtime. Calculate the potential revenue loss, increased costs, and any fines or penalties you might incur. This can reveal the true cost of a disruption and justify the investment in disaster recovery measures.
3. Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan
Based on your risk assessment and BIA, you can now develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including detailed procedures for:
- Incident response and notification
- Data backup and recovery
- System restoration
- Business continuity
- Crisis communication
Assign roles and responsibilities to ensure everyone knows what is expected of them in the event of a crisis.
Regularly testing the plan helps identify any weaknesses. For example, you could conduct a simulation of a cyberattack to reveal gaps in your response procedures. Then, use the test results to make necessary adjustments to the plan.
Additionally, consider the cost and benefits of different disaster recovery solutions. For example, consider investing in cloud-based backup solutions if that would offer better value and flexibility compared to traditional on-site backups.
4. Test and Maintain the Plan
A disaster recovery plan requires ongoing testing and maintenance to ensure its effectiveness. Try various ways to test it, such as simulations, drills, and tabletop exercises. Update the plan as your organisation or technology changes, such as when you adopt new software or move to a new office.
Our podcast Fail Fast, Recover Faster: Lessons from the CrowdStrike Outage goes through the topic of business resilience in detail and provides tips on how often businesses should update their disaster recovery plan. Watch it now!
5. Educate Your Team
Start by developing clear training materials that outline the plan in detail, including step-by-step procedures and contact information for key personnel. Conduct regular training sessions, where you can:
- Use real-life scenarios to make the training engaging and relevant
- Simulate disaster scenarios to identify any weaknesses in the plan
- Leverage technology and tools that can make training more effective
- Encourage feedback and participation, to keep improving the plan and to foster a culture of preparedness
- Recognise employees who actively participate in training, to reinforce its value and encourage engagement
- Provide regular updates and refresher courses, to keep everyone informed and up-to-date
Bounce Back Faster
Developing a robust disaster recovery strategy is crucial for business resilience. Following the above steps can help you ensure your business is prepared to handle any disasters, and can recover quickly.
Remember: We can’t avoid disasters, but we can mitigate their impact. Start today by exploring our IT disaster recovery services:
