When you start and develop a business, you never think you could lose it in a single moment. Your organization seems stable and brings profits, so you keep investing funds in activities and parts that can help your business grow and evolve. But the entire organization can be gone one day.
Some businesses fail because of a flood, ransomware attack, or another catastrophic event. To avoid these consequences, you need a business disaster recovery plan. This post explains what that plan is and which points should be included.
What is a business disaster recovery plan?
A disaster recovery plan for a business is a document containing the action sequences required to maintain the organization’s production in an emergency. Every second of delay means business downtime prolongs, costing the organization money and reputational losses. When the actions required to support continuity of business operations are figured out beforehand, they are likely to be timely.
Here are three points to consider:
- 40% of small businesses without DR plans never resume operation after disasters
- 93% of organizations that fail to recover during five days close within the next year
- 96% of businesses with recovery plans and solutions like NAKIVO software implemented successfully recovered from ransomware attacks.
If you had doubts about your organization requiring a disaster recovery plan, they should be gone after you know those numbers. A small business needs a thoroughly composed and tested DR strategy. Otherwise, any disruptive situation will have devastating consequences.
How to create a disaster recovery plan for small business?
Creating and implementing a DR plan that will be the reliance point for your organization in unpredicted cases will require effort and time. However, the resources spent to develop a trusted plan will pay off with avoided or reduced asset losses when an emergency happens. Below we explain what to include in a small business disaster recovery plan to ensure efficiency.
Define recovery requirements
To build up a business disaster recovery plan, you need to know the key points to measure its effectiveness. Here, the significant activities of the planning section include figuring out two main parameters outlining recovery objectives:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This parameter defines the maximum amount of data loss that the organization can tolerate in case of a disaster.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This parameter defines the maximum downtime the organization can tolerate when a disaster occurs.
Small businesses have limited financial and human resources. When you have precise objectives, you can better distribute the limited resources to achieve them.
Know your assets
Assets drive your organization’s operation. They can include data, intellectual property, real estate, hardware, documents, and so forth. A disaster renders assets temporarily or permanently unavailable. To support business continuity, you need to know which assets your organization depends on. Analyze the structure and evaluate parts of it to divide them into three categories:
- Critical: workloads and elements that the organization uses continuously. These are the assets that should be priority targets for disaster recovery sequences. The RTO and RPO for critical infrastructure parts are minimal.
- Important: assets used for production purposes at least once per 24 hours, which means you have more time to recover them without harming the organization’s performance.
- Ignorable: apps, digital nodes, equipment, and anything else your organization uses less frequently than once a day. The recovery of these assets can be postponed.
Your DR strategy then should revolve around the required RPO and RTO for the assets with different priority levels. Knowing the needs and priorities, you can optimize available resources to meet recovery objectives.
Distribute responsibility areas
Your employees have to know for sure what and how to do in the face of a disaster. Delegating is key to organization, and this works for disaster recovery activities. Document responsibilities shared between employees. Then, ensure they know how to act in an emergency. Responsibility areas may include the following:
- Data backup and business continuity support
- Staff and equipment evacuation
- Disaster declaration and monitoring
- Notifying priority clients
- Contacts with partners and vendors
- Reports to management, stakeholders, and press
- Post-crisis management and recovery organization
Put responsibilities and instructions for every employee involved. Ensure staff members are familiar with the order of actions they need to follow in an emergency. Train employees before it’s too late. Even a lightly trained person is less likely to panic and get stuck in stressful situations.
Develop communication plans
After the responsibility areas are known and divided, create a map with the sequence of key emergency contacts for every person in charge. That is how you narrow down the processes for every responsible team member to provide the wanted result. They don’t just know their role with a map at hand but have a working template to follow.
Add both internal and external contacts to that map and check the relevance of the contact info entries you have. Contacting the required people inside an organization helps create synergy and react to the critical situation more efficiently. Timely notifying the officials, key clients, suppliers, and partners outside an organization can set the wanted basis for post-disaster mitigation.
Get remote storage
To keep critical data and spare equipment safe from disasters, you’ll require a safe storage place, and it should be distant enough from the leading site to avoid being hit with the same disaster. At the same time, you need to make it accessible to use reserve resources for business continuity support operatively.
That remote storage can host spare inventory parts, a secondary server, and hardware items required for your organization’s production. When a disaster occurs and damages the equipment at the leading site, you don’t need to purchase and set up the new hardware, and you can just bring and use previously prepared items from the remote storage instead.
Also, a remote storage place can keep disks with data backups safe and connected to a secondary server. The server can then turn into a failover site. You can use it to replicate your critical IT infrastructure and maintain production continuity until you deal with the disaster consequences at the leading site.
Set up a regular backup process for sensitive data
The well-established data backup and recovery process is a must-have element for the DR strategies of modern businesses. For some areas and market branches, data can be the most valuable asset an organization has. Effective backup workflows should be automated regarding the amount of data generated, stored, and processed by even the smallest organizations in production.
Data backup and recovery process automation is possible with either proprietary backup appliances or universal software solutions. While backup appliances are too expensive for small businesses, software solutions can offer equal efficiency and function set along with flexible licensing models. The cost-efficiency correlation of modern data protection solutions like NAKIVO software makes them the top choice for small businesses with limited budgets.
Additionally, recent backup and recovery software can help you protect your organization’s data from ransomware. First, you can automate sending backups to remote storage disks and the cloud. Thus, you avoid a single point of failure and have backups to use even when the main site is down to a disaster.
Second, you can set immutability periods for backup data. Immutable backups are protected from any change or deletion and can be used for recovery even after a ransomware attack.
Test DR Workflows
You should test your small business disaster recovery plan after you develop it. Don’t leave a DR plan on paper until an actual emergency happens, especially if that is the first plan you composed. Most probably, adjustments, changes, and additional tweaks will be required.
And even if the plan works perfectly, you may find out that meeting your recovery requirements will take more resources than you can allocate. The resource pool of small businesses is normal to be strictly limited, so you might want to optimize workflows or change RTOs and RPOs.
Now is the right time to create a DR plan
You might prioritize tasks that directly increase the organization’s income and boost business growth. However, you risk losing what you have now without a disaster recovery plan. Your organization won’t be able to grow if a disaster ruins it. A thoroughly developed and tested disaster recovery plan sample for a small business is the primary safety guideline for your organization’s survival in an emergency.
You must consider all the above described aspects in regard to disaster recovery of a business. This is the best way to ensure that a business will keep running even after facing an emergency situation.
