A disaster recovery plan is how your business gets its data back after it's lost, encrypted, or held for ransom. Build it in four steps: get leadership on board, map your systems, write the plan, and test it on real people. The fourth step is the one most businesses skip, and it's the one that decides whether the plan works.
The stakes are real. According to several sources, 93% of companies are out of business within one year of a major data disaster if they had no plan ready first. And 68% of businesses don't have one. For most companies in the country, losing their data would be the end.
Yours doesn't have to be. Here's how to put a solid plan in place.
First, know the difference from a business continuity plan
People mix these up. A business continuity plan is proactive: it keeps you operating and serving customers no matter what hits you. A disaster recovery plan is reactive: it's the strategy for backing up and recovering critical data after it's lost or held for ransom. This post is about the second one.
Step 1: Get information and buy-in
Start with executive buy-in. Everyone, from the CEO down to entry-level staff, needs to be in on executing the plan if a data disaster hits. When the whole company knows it can happen, people across functions work together to build the plan, and that's the only way to cover every part of your systems.
Account for everything in your tech stack: systems, applications, and data. Don't stop at the digital side. Think about the physical security of your servers and who can physically reach your systems, and have a plan for the day those are compromised too.
Then decide which processes absolutely have to keep running in a worst-case scenario, when your capacity is limited.
Step 2: Write the actual plan
Once everyone's on board and you know your vulnerabilities and which systems have to stay up, write the game plan. That means getting a clear grip on your budget, resources, tools, and partners.
If you run a small business, start with your budget and a realistic recovery timeline. Those two numbers shape the rest of the plan, and they tell you what to promise customers while you get back to full operating capacity.
Step 3: Test it on real people
You don't actually know the plan works until you run it. Walk your employees through every step so they know their part before a real emergency, not during one. A dry run also surfaces the gaps you'd otherwise find at the worst possible moment. Do it now, and when a real disaster hits, your systems and your people already know how to move.
The plan in four moves:
- Get executive buy-in for the plan.
- Map your systems and how a disaster would hit each one.
- Prioritize the systems your business can't run without.
- Test the plan to see whether it actually holds up.
Work through these four steps and your business can come out the other side of a data disaster still standing.