A disaster recovery (DR) plan is a set of procedures and tools for preventing and responding to unplanned events. It’s not just for businesses that operate in disaster-prone areas—businesses of all sizes should have a solid DR plan to ensure that they can keep operating if their primary systems go down or are otherwise interrupted by cyberattacks, natural disasters or other unplanned events.
Disaster recovery has many benefits to organizations, ranging from improved employee morale to stronger customer retention. However, the biggest benefit is the ability to minimize overall damage by recovering operations as quickly as possible after an event occurs. This is a critical component to a business’s security posture because downtime can be costly in terms of lost productivity, diminished customer satisfaction and degraded brand reputation.
Ultimately, a disaster recovery solution aims to minimize data loss. By storing backups of critical systems and data at an alternate site, businesses can recover from an outage or other disruptive events with near-zero downtime, thereby bolstering their business continuity stance.
The key to a successful disaster recovery strategy is assembling the right team and training them on responsibilities, expectations and how to execute the plan. This includes identifying the roles and responsibilities of every member, as well as documenting expected recovery times for each process and service to be able to measure progress. It’s also essential to regularly test the DR plan to ensure it works properly. disaster recovery