Disaster Recovery Plan: What Is It, And How To Develop It?

Disaster Recovery Plan: Every company is subject to a series of structural, financial, or technological risks. When you invest in effective management of such elements, you can identify what they are and seek strategies to eliminate or minimize them.

As much as you bet on action plans to minimize risks, it is still impossible to control all the variables related to each. This means that, despite being very important, risk management cannot guarantee that your company will not experience a disaster. Therefore, the question remains: if one of these risks materializes and happens, how to proceed?

The disaster recovery plan comes in right at this point. Find out now how to develop one for your organization. Good reading!

What Is A Disaster Recovery Plan?

The disaster recovery plan is a set of actions that should be taken if your company experiences serious problems. In other words, it is an action plan that indicates how you and your employees should proceed to recover the organization and ensure its maintenance if the predicted disaster occurs.

In this way, this document addresses all the problems that the company may face individually. It is possible, for example, that you perceive the risk of a fire in the structure, which is considered a disaster. Another potential problem that can be noticed is a financial crisis in the country that causes your organization to face serious economic risks.

From these inconveniences, the disaster recovery plan must contain all the instructions on the actions that must be taken in each situation. It includes disaster containment— the steps that are relevant while it is happening to minimize the damage — and recovery, indicating those that must be performed after the problem to restore the corporation’s health.

How To Create A Disaster Recovery Plan For The Company?

Now that you know what a disaster recovery plan is, it’s time to understand how to create one for your organization. See the step-by-step process below.

Identify The Risks

First, you must identify which disasters your company is subject to. They can have a natural origin, such as floods, fires or others, as well as a human or economic-social origin, such as financial crises and pandemics.

Therefore, analyze your company well, the place it is inserted and the sector in which you operate. Evaluate the data and try to identify all the risks you are subject to, and make a list.

Analyze The Impact Of Risks

Each of the risks analyzed can have a different impact on your corporation. A flood can, for example, damage the entire physical structure of the organization, including equipment, raw materials and products. A pandemic, on the other hand, may not damage the bodily system but jeopardize the functioning of the business and its production capacity.

Therefore, for each of the risks, identify the impacts that the enterprise may suffer. Also, remember what can be done today to minimize these long-term impacts.

Create An Action Plan To Contain The Disaster

At this point, you must create an action plan to contain the disaster while it is still occurring. For example, in the event of a fire, it is essential to have a building evacuation plan to avoid accidents with the team. It may also be necessary to trigger a fire alarm, for example, or close fire doors to minimize the spread of flames. Make this action manual for each identified risk, always focusing on containing and minimizing the impacts of the ongoing disaster.

Create An Action Plan For Business Recovery

Now is the time to create an action plan for the company’s turnaround. That is, to deal with the consequences of the disaster. To do this, you can determine an RTO (which stands for recovery time) and an RPO (which stands for recovery points). In the RTO, you choose how long the company can be closed to recover before it can resume operations. In the second, the objective is to determine the elements that can be lost during a disaster and the recovery priorities for the company to get back up and running.

From there, create the entire recovery strategy for the organization, identifying what must be done, what resources will be mobilized at that moment, and even what cannot be done. With the plan in hand, empower the team to put it into action if disaster strikes.

Review The Plan Frequently

Situations change over time, so you must review the plan frequently. Set a time limit for the review and run it whenever necessary. Remember to perform the risk diagnosis again to identify that no new potential hazards have emerged over time.

How Important Is A Disaster Recovery Plan?

Having a disaster recovery plan is extremely important for your business. This is because it is never possible to eliminate all the risks to which the organization is subject. After all, many of the variables are out of your control. That way, when you have a quality disaster recovery plan in place, you can reduce the impacts of your corporation’s problems over time.

It is possible to increase the organization’s chances of survival even in the face of a severe problem since there has been prior preparation for it. Furthermore, it is feasible to reduce the impacts of disasters since, from the beginning, the team will know how to behave to minimize the effects and respond quickly to occurrences.

Also Read: Four Business Agility Results For The Organization