Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters can happen to any business and they come in many forms and severities. They can be everything from a natural disaster, to a well-meaning employee accidently downloading a dangerous virus, to something crucial getting mistakenly deleted. These what-ifs can keep you up at night, so for your own peace of mind develop a disaster recovery plan.

Decide What’s Important

The first step is to determine what data is crucial to your business. What data must be recovered quickly for your company to run? This will tell you what you should back up.

Make a Plan

Your next step is to consider what steps you should take if something happens. Begin with the worst possible scenario and create a plan for that. What technology do you need if everything is destroyed, what data, and what systems must be back up ASAP? Write down all of these in order of importance.

Know Your Workflows

While you have the overall picture of how your business runs, you probably don’t know every single process everyone does. Have your staff document the processes and workflows they perform to complete tasks for the company. In the event of something tragic, anyone can read the process document and preform an important task.

Decide Who is in Charge

Depending on the kind of disaster you experience, your employees could panic.  Before this happens, select one levelheaded person in the organization to be “in charge” of the disaster recovery plan. They ought to know the plan as well as you do and maybe have helped you create it. This is the person you turn to for execution of the plan, so that you can be the strong leader your employees need at a time like this.

When we hear of disaster people often think it can’t happen to them, but we never know what is around the corner. It’s important to be prepared. Having a strong disaster recovery plan will not only make you feel more secure, but will comfort your employees as well.