Approximately 236.1 million ransomware attacks were reported worldwide in 2022 first half and misconfigurations were responsible for as much as 13% of all security breaches as per a study available online.
Having disaster recovery planning ensures that one can get data center operations back up and running efficiently in the smallest possible time when an incident occurs and business is not impacted on a large scale.
What is Disaster Recovery Planning?
Instructions that standardize steps a particular organization would follow to respond while facing disruptive events, such as natural disasters, power outages, and cyber-attacks are termed Disaster Recovery Planning.
A disruptive event might result in a loss of customer trust, loss of brand authority, or sometimes resulting in financial loss.
In today’s world while most of the processes are moved to cloud platforms for seamless operations cloud backup disaster recovery plan is one of the essential area organizations needs to focus on.
Here are 10 checklists one must follow while preparing a computer disaster recovery or a cloud backup disaster recovery plan.
1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) & Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a disaster recovery planning metric that represents the maximum allowable data loss in the event of a system failure or disaster.
It’s expressed as a period and determines how quickly data must be recovered from backups to minimize business disruption.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is a disaster recovery planning metric that represents the maximum amount of time it should take to recover systems and resume normal business operations after a disaster or system failure.
It’s a crucial factor in planning and implementing a disaster recovery strategy.
2. Check Hardware & Software Inventory
To create an effective cloud backup disaster recovery and computer disaster recovery plan, one must have a comprehensive, up-to-date inventory of IT assets which can be categorized into three categories.
Assets necessary for business operations as critical, applications that are used once daily and can disrupt business as important, and applications that are used less frequently than once per day can be classified as unimportant.
3. Determine Equipment Needs
Once hardware and software inventory are available, the next phase will be to determine the equipment needs to create a computer disaster recovery plan.
The primary goal during this phase of the planning process must be to identify what disaster recovery planning, mitigation, and recovery strategies currently exist and where one might be able to overcome deficiencies with the addition of some additional equipment to the data center.
4. Conduct Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessment
During the process of disaster recovery planning it is important to conduct a business impact analysis and risk assessment.
The aim behind this is to identify the risks to the organization’s ability to do business and then quantify those risks based on the likelihood that they’ll occur and the severity of the impact those risks might have on the organization.
5. Identify Team Roles and Responsibilities
Good disaster recovery planning can work only when the organization’s disaster recovery team is prepared to execute the plan.
Determine each person’s responsibilities and who will be a part of the disaster recovery planning team.
6. Choose Disaster Recovery Sites
A crucial part of disaster recovery planning is to form a business continuity plan. A business continuity plan defines how the organization will carry out its functions after a disaster.
If an organization’s primary data center is impacted by a disaster, then important workloads need to be routed over to an alternate location where they can continue to run based on disaster recovery planning.
This can be a secondary data center, or it can be a location in a public cloud. Cloud backup disaster recovery helps in routing the load to a secondary data center in case the main center is down.
7. Outline and Detail Response Procedures
Ideal disaster recovery planning should include steps to recover from a disaster. There should be no ambiguity in times of crisis.
The team responsible for recovering from the crisis should have a list of very specific steps that one can take to complete the required task.
If steps are not well defined initially at the time of disaster recovery planning it is likely to cause technicians to miss certain necessary steps in the process.
Computer disaster recovery and cloud backup disaster recovery should also outline steps for hardware replacement and availability should be planned if necessary for perfect disaster recovery planning.
8. Create a Crisis Communication Plan
Most of the time crisis communication plan is an overlooked step in disaster recovery planning.
Receiving multiple status updates about the progress in recovering from a crisis adds to the stress of the situation.
A person from the IT team should be designated as the person responsible for relaying vital information about the cloud backup disaster recovery to stakeholders throughout the organization.
9. Plan for Failback
When a crisis impacts an organization’s hot site wherein workloads are normally running and those workloads must be moved to an alternate location, there must be a plan to bring those workloads back to their original location once the disaster is over and cloud backup disaster recovery is in process.
10. Run Disaster Recovery Drills
It is essential to ensure that the cloud backup disaster recovery plan is regularly tested. A cloud backup disaster recovery plan might look great on a piece of paper but might fail when it is needed the most.
To avoid such scenarios from happening, running a drill and testing a cloud backup disaster recovery plan along with computer disaster recovery for hardware check is essential for efficient disaster recovery planning
This also trains the people working on cloud backup disaster recovery and disaster recovery planning team to get an understanding of a realistic scenario and learn the lessons from the drill and update the plan to make it more effective.
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