Disaster Recovery Planning: Key Steps to Mitigate Risks and Protect Your Company’s Data

A solid disaster recovery (DR) plan needs time and attention to form properly. Usually, the total investment closely coincides with the size and scope of the organization. Due to the level of effort, many businesses need help improving their process beyond regular backups. Some also struggle with finding a logical starting point.

To get started, you need to build a checklist. It should include clear goals and the activities that will achieve them. You will need to create a custom list that fits your particular needs. You will likely need to refine the list of items as you work through it.

Creating Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Checklist

You can use the following example checklist as a starting point. Here are the essential items you will need to include in your backup and disaster recovery checklist:

• Make the business case for a disaster recovery plan;
• Identify risks;
• Determine key stakeholders;
• Define a data prioritization strategy, including immutable backups;
• Discover your data protection scope;
• Define recovery objectives and tolerances (RTOs and RPOs);
• Determine solutions;
• Define capital and operating budgets;
• Create an implementation plan;
• Create a business continuity plan;
• Create a disaster recovery plan;
• Create test plans;
• Follow the implementation plan;
• Schedule and follow the review plan.

Your list will grow beyond this one, usually with several sub-items specific to your particular requirements. Out of all these items, the last one, “Schedule and follow the review plan”, may very well be the most important.

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Wrap Up

Disaster recovery planning is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. You will do most of the work during the initial planning phase, but your organization cannot simply abandon the plan after implementation. Your first item, making the business case, usually spans a few of the items that follow. You can easily gain acknowledgment of the importance of backup, but you need an organizational commitment to a thorough plan.