10 Best Practices for Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

Disaster recovery planning is the process of creating a comprehensive plan to help your organization resume work after the loss of data, equipment, or network access following a natural or human-made disaster. A good disaster recovery plan will ensure this is done with minimal business disruption.

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?

A disaster recovery plan is a set of actions that helps an organization recover its technology and operations based on its business policies. It is a component of security planning and a subset of business continuity planning. 

If there is anything COVID-19 taught the world, it is that disaster strikes with no warning. Whether the surprise is a global pandemic, rampant wildfires, or a worldwide Microsoft outage, businesses must be equipped to provide goods and services. One way of doing this is planning — figuring out which resources are essential and how they can be protected and backed up.

Importance of a stable DRP:

• Disaster management: No business can run successfully without substantial tech-based infrastructure. To put things in perspective, the 2023 BCI Continuity and Resilience ReportOpens a new window stated that the top supply chain disruptors were loss of talent, human illness, transport network disruption, adverse weather, and cyberattacks or data breaches.
• Cost of disruption: According to Dell’s 2024 Global Data Protection Index SurveyOpens a new window , cyberattacks and disruptive events are rising meteorically. 90% of the organizations reported an unplanned disruption in the last year, a number which was only 76% in 2021. In fact, cyberattacks alone cost businesses an average of $1.92 million. Hefty figures aside, business continuity is also a matter of reputation and trust for customers and stakeholders. 

8 Steps to Build a Disaster Recovery Plan

Creating a disaster recovery plan is something that takes time. You’ll need to gather organizational stakeholders, assess risks, choose a recovery strategy, and make a detailed playbook. The following steps will help you build a resilient, reliable, and effective disaster recovery plan.

1. Gather a team of experts and stakeholders

Creating a disaster recovery plan is not a one-person job. It involves input from various internal employees and external vendors. A good DRP team consists the following roles: 

• • Infrastructure SMEs: Creating a DRP requires an in-depth knowledge of all hardware, software, data, and network connectivity. This means that the corresponding domain experts from the organization’s IT department should be a part of the DRP team.
  • Individual department heads: While every business unit has its set of critical assets and functionalities, these are governed by compliance and legal regulations. It is, therefore, important to have someone representing each business unit.
  • Senior management: Since DRP is a part of business continuity planning (BCP), the organization’s business objectives and strategies must be taken into consideration. Senior management must be involved to make these policy-level decisions.
  • Human resources: An HR representative should be present to enable smooth internal communication in case of work disruption.
  • Public relations officers: Your public relations representative can help you build a communications strategy to keep customers and stakeholders informed. 

Apart from these internal members, property managers, law enforcement contacts, and emergency responders may also be added to the team.

2. Take inventory and analyze business impact

Business impact analysis (BIA) is the foundation of good DRP. This step breaks down and quantifies the organization’s IT infrastructure and processes in terms of the cost of downtime and criticality. Individual assets, services, and functions are evaluated based on how long the company can run without facing financial losses, reputational losses, or regulatory penalties if the asset fails. 

Your inventory should include any asset that drives the functioning of the organization, including:

• • Hardware
  • Software
  • Network
  • Cloud or SaaS services 
  • Virtual machines 

The outcome of this step is an inventory list containing cost, legal and regulatory requirements, details such as operating systems, configuration settings, version numbers, license keys, and criticality of each. Mission-critical assets — those that can bring the company to a halt if they are inaccessible — must be marked. 

3. Identify the disaster recovery planning metrics

The next step is to create formal and tangible goals of recovery for each function of the business.

• • Goal 1 — Determine the recovery time objective (RTO)

This is the amount of time a particular service can be offline without a significant business impact. For example, for an e-commerce website, the ‘Add to Cart’ functionality cannot be down for more than a few minutes. But the ‘Customer Care chat history’ option can be down for a few hours without significant impact.

• Goal 2 — Determine the recovery point objective (RPO)

The recovery point objective (RPO) determines how frequently your data should be backed for each asset or function. This essentially tells you how outdated your data get when an unplanned incident occurs. For example, marketing campaign data can be more than 24 hours old, but records of financial transactions may need to be as close to real-time as possible.

These metrics should consider industry regulations and compliance factors and not be restricted to immediate business impact. For instance, hospitals that lose patient electronic health records are subject to HIPAA penalties.

4. Conduct a risk assessment and identify the plan’s scope

The risk assessment stage looks into possible reasons for the loss. During risk assessment, make sure that you: 

1. 1. Analyze all potential threats to the functioning of the business. These threats include natural disasters, national emergencies and shutdowns, regional disasters, regulatory changes, application failures, data center disasters, communication breakdowns, and cyberattacks. To tackle these, make sure your contingency management includes hardware and other maintenance, protection from power outages, and security from ransomware.
   2. Evaluate business vulnerability for each threat. Quantify each threat with the time and resources it would take to address. The potential cost of leaving each risk unaddressed should also be considered.
   3. Come up with a response plan for each vulnerability, including preventive measures like upgrades, stronger security polices, or implementing security controls, and strict security policies.
   4. Create a risk management plan based on associated costs and potential losses. Also, consider the frequency and probability of each threat. A risk assessment matrix allows you to rank each disaster based on the likelihood of occurrence, how much it would impact business, and how prepared you are to face it. You can prioritize which risks to focus on based on where it falls in the matrix. 

5. Decide on the type of disaster recovery plan

You should not use a one-size-fits-all disaster recovery plan template. Consider one of the following solutions based on the results of your risk assessment and budget:

• Data Center DR:

  A data center DRP involves investing in and maintaining a whole other data center building as a backup. This is usually called a disaster recovery site. When the primary operation goes down, this site is expected to be fully operational and kick in without delay. Consider one of these three types of data recovery sites:

  • A cold site is an infrastructural backup — essentially an office space with power, cooling, and communication systems. They do not house any hardware or have a network configured. In the case of a system failure, the operational teams will need to migrate servers and set everything up from scratch. It is the least expensive option. However, it requires extra labor after the fact and may not meet the organization’s RTO goals if not executed properly.
  • A hot site is the exact copy of the primary data center setup. It has all the necessary hardware, software, and network configured. Data is backed up based on RPO goals. In case of an outage, operations are moved to the hot site without delay and continue with minimal downtime. This is the most effective option, but it is also the most expensive because it requires a constantly functioning setup.
  • A warm site is one that houses the necessary hardware with some pre-installed software and network configurations. Only mission-critical assets are backed up at less frequent intervals. This is a good option for organizations with less critical data and higher RPOs. 

• Virtualized DR:

  This solution uses virtual machines instead of actual hardware and recovery sites. Images of the primary infrastructure are stored and updated at regular intervals. Virtualization-based DRPs are considerably cheaper than a data center plan, but a recovery strategy that identifies which recovery software and backup medium to be used is crucial.

• Cloud-based DR

  Using a third-party cloud provider to backing up critical assets keeps your data offsite, but accessible when needed. This strategy requires coordination with the cloud managers in terms of security, testing, and meeting the RTO and RPO goals. This option is cheaper than data center recovery planning but can be more expensive than virtualization.

• Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS):

  If an organization lacks the expertise and resources to create their own plan, they can enlist the services of a third-party service provider. These providers are referred to as DRaaS companies. It is important to make sure that the service level agreement (SLA) with these companies is in line with the organization’s DRP vision. DRaaS costs vary based on disaster recovery planning goals.

6. Create a disaster recovery playbook

A disaster recovery plan must consist of an RTO and RPO for each service and a step by step recovery plan based on the type of disaster recovery plan chosen. A completed disaster recovery playbook doesn’t just end with that. Other mandatory information includes:

1. 1. • List of employees in charge of each service, along with their contact information.
      • Information packets for each person in charge, with required passwords, access grants, and other configuration information gathered during inventory analysis.
      • Main point of contact to oversee operations after the disaster occurs, and to troubleshoot any issues with the plan.
      • Contact information of software vendors and third party services.
      • Information about emergency responders
      • Contact information of facility owners and property managers.
      • In case of data center DRP, a diagram of the entire IT infrastructure, with recovery sites and directions to access them.
      • In case of virtualization-based DRP, information of the virtual machine’s storage medium and recovery steps.

7. Test the disaster recovery plan

A strong plan will also be a well-tested plan. Testing should also be carried out at regular, scheduled intervals. Different tests can be carried out at different points of time in the cycle. It may be tempting to skip this step due to the magnitude of the operation, but it is more costly to find out your plan doesn’t work if you wait until an emergency occurs. Consider these different ways to test your disaster recovery plan:

1. 1. • Walk-through test: Sit with the team members and stakeholders, and just read through the playbook. Make any corrections or updates necessary. No business operations are disrupted.
      • Simulation test: Simulate the disaster and see how well the DRP executes. This should not disrupt existing operations.
      • Parallel test: Rebuild your key services using your backed-up assets and see if they can process real-world transactions. This is done in parallel to the actual system, which continues to process data as normal.
      • Full interruption test: This test assumes that the primary system is completely down, and all of the incoming load is directed to the failover systems. Your existing processes will be disrupted, as you will take the existing system offline.

It is also not necessary to test the entire system in every cycle. Individual components can be tested based on any changes made in the system or routine maintenance. Combining multiple components for a narrow test run is also an option.

A successful test isn’t just a playbook implementation that runs without errors. Any issues captured during the testing and marked to be fixed without delay should also be considered successes. Your plan should also include what constitutes success – these metrics are how you determine if you can meet your service level agreements.

8. Establish a communication plan

Automated tests and employee awareness training sessions should be conducted regularly. Disaster recovery exercises and drills should also be carried out at regular intervals.

Since an outage can cause panic and outrage, it is prudent to have a public relations plan in place that includes information about the cause of the disruption and how long it should take for the system to recover. This makes stakeholder appeasement easier.

Following these 10 steps will definitely result in a fail-proof disaster recovery plan. There are multiple checklists available online to make sure that you do not skip over any of them. Remember — a good DRP focuses on managing the crisis, restoring business-critical functions, and recovering, all while communicating with your stakeholders, as explained by Tom Roepke and Steven Goldman in the Disaster Recovery Journal. 

10 Best Practices to Create and Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan

Best Practices To Create and Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan

1. Focus on the assets and vulnerabilities, rather than the disaster

Picking particular disasters and focusing only on risks associated with them can draw attention away from other threats. A better approach would be to identify core assets and services and then working up to the associated vulnerabilities.

2. Keep iterating the process

Disaster recovery planning is not a one-time process. Business requirements keep changing, new infrastructure is added every day and industry regulations are updated all the time. Therefore, your plan also needs to keep changing. It is best to have scheduled sessions, ideally three to four times a year. It can also be based on certain milestones or triggers — like adding a new service or making major changes in an existing one. A good DRP grows with the business.

3. Maintain a readily accessible disaster recovery playbook

Multiple stakeholders need a disaster recovery playbook written in clear, concise, and easily understandable language. After approval and testing of the playbook, you should place a hard copy in an area where it’s easily accessible. Meanwhile, you should load a soft copy onto the cloud or a portable medium. As long as the plan is subject to change, the plan and playbook must be easily modifiable. 

4. Do not forget the processes

Disaster recovery is about more than just the hardware and the software. Each step involves people and processes. Your playbook will need to include work-process solutions. For instance, will the recovery team have a backup work location to operate from? In this situation, will remote employees have secure access points to log into your systems?

5. Have a testing schedule and stick to it

A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its testing schedule. After all, an untested plan leads to a false sense of security. 81% of respondents have had to invoke their business continuity plan in the past five years, according to Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery JournalOpens a new window , yet a majority of organizations still only test their plan once a year. Generally, IT teams test disaster recovery plans three to four times a year, though some bigger enterprises with complex systems carry them out monthly.

6. Create comprehensive post-test reports

Documenting both the test and the results is the best way to ensure your plan is accurate and up-to-date. The reports should include a list of the types of tests carried out, how often tests are run, the procedures followed, and an analysis of what happened. Your organization should document any success factors, including errors you identified and corrected.

7. Keep up employee awareness, training, and drills

Disaster recovery drills need to become part of the company culture, just like fire drills. You should keep all stakeholders updated about modifications to the plan. For this reason, your organization should hold frequent training sessions and update everyone’s contact information regularly. 

8. Supplement your plan with security and data protection solutions

Replicating a whole new secondary setup means replicating security concerns as well. The primary system must be ready to curtail any cyberattacks or ransomware demands. These attacks should not penetrate your network while duplicating data for backup.

9. Protect the everyday software

Even though they are not directly involved with your business, you must consider SaaS applications like Office365, Google Workspace, or Salesforce. If your employees lose access to these tools, it could have a long term effect. For example, you must include your email suite in the plan, as losing instant communication could significantly impede business.

10. Ensure good reporting

On-ground reporting is just as, if not more, important than test reports. When a disaster strikes and you initiate your recovery plan, you must also ensure to document each step. It is the best way to figure out what works best and what needs tweaking.

Conclusion

With the number of natural and human-made threats increasing daily, creating, adopting, and maintaining a well-thought-out plan makes good business sense. A good disaster recovery plan goes a long way in creating a confident and resilient business.

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• Popular Disaster Recovery Software Tools