What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A Disaster Recovery Plan is formed inline with a Business Continuity Plan. Business continuity covers the whole business and what would happen in a disaster such as operations and staff whereas a Disaster Recovery Plan tends to focus on specific steps to get an organisation back up and running following an incident (usually focusing on technology infrastructure.)

What does a Disaster Recovery Plan include?

A disaster recovery plan is essentially a comprehensive document which details what needs to happen, before during and after a disaster.

The disaster plan would include; prevention, detection and correction.

What type of Disaster should your business plan for?

It varies for different organisations but these are the most common types of disaster:

Natural disaster e.g. Fire

Terrorist Attack

Cyber attack

Epidemic illness

Why is a Disaster Recovery Plan important to a business?

We use technology every day and many organisations are built on technology, if one system or all of them went down it could seriously damage the business. Businesses have been known to go out of business because they couldn’t recover what was lost.

It is also becoming more commonplace with cyber-attacks being more prominent.

What are the key elements of a typical Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster plan should detail what the organisation as a whole should do as well as any particular people who need to do certain tasks should do. It should detail all of the systems that you have in place and expected downtime.

Key elements to include in your disaster recovery plan:

DR Goals – what is the main aim of this plan?

Detail when to use the plan – when should the plan take effect?

Business impact – how will it affect the business financially, operationally or otherwise?

Preventative measures – can this be prevented with regular

Plan of action – the plan, step-by-step which should include the following

Who is responsible for putting the plan in action, including;

Risks – any further risks associated with this plan or the ongoing impact to the business

Potential downtime timeline

Costs involved in implementing