According to the Gartner, more than 40% of businesses will never reopen after a major natural disaster. Over the last few decades, business continuity strategies have become more vigilant. Both small-size and large-scale companies require high-quality data protection due to the nature of the data being sensitive.
Apart from this, one in five organizations has been critically hit by outages in the past three years due to downtime halting the workflow for a substantial amount of time.
All of this could have been prevented if the attacked organization had a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in place. Today, with the help of this blog, you are going to find out the importance of DRP in your business and how it helps keep your sensitive information safe from online threats.
How To Make Disaster Recovery Plan More Effective?
Here are some of the crucial elements that every DRP needs to have to protect business from disruptive scenarios.
Goals
A business needs to define how a DRP needs to respond when the business is under attack. Here, you need to include things like downtime maximums, data loss maximums, recovery time, and point objects.
Backup Procedures
DRP should be able to fetch all the different data resources, and the instructions have to be clear for recovering the data from the backup.
IT Inventory
List of all the assets, which includes both software and hardware, their usage in the business, and they need to be marked in case they are critical for the smooth operation.
Staff Responsibilities
This list needs to include all the staff members who were involved in the making of DRP, what responsibilities and actions they need to take during disruption, and who is going to be their backup if they are not available.
Disaster Recovery Sites
There has to be a secondary offsite location where the backup and all the data need to be stored.
Disaster Recovery Procedures
Figure out how your organization is going to respond in an emergency and limit the extent of damage while performing urgent backups.
Disaster Recovery Point
A calculated percentage of how much of the data might be lost during the recovery efforts. You can adjust it by finding out the perfect frequency of data backups.
Disaster Recovery Time
You need to estimate how long it is going to take for workflow to resume its operation at a normal pace after the disaster.
Restoration
Mark out all the procedures that need to be followed by the DRP team to restore lost data systems to ensure that normal operations can resume as fast as possible.
DRP Testing
Lastly, you need to plan frequent testing of the DRP to ensure all the elements of the DRP are working and fulfilling their actions as required.
Benefits Of Planning Disaster Recovery Well in Advance
Data is your most valuable asset, and it constantly remains under threat. With DRP in place, you will have a proactive approach towards mitigating the impact of disaster. In addition to this, here are five major benefits that you get from planning disaster recovery well in advance.
1 Actionable Insights
See, creating an effective DRP is not an overnight process; it usually takes months before you start testing it. During the process of forming a DRP, you will have extensive fact-finding and analysis of your own systems. Meaning you will get to know more about the hardware and software programs.
Network and security administrators in the company will be able to locate weak areas within their systems and help prevent data breaches before they occur.
2 Faster Recovery
The cost of IT downtime can reach up to millions of dollars per hour for larger companies. With the help of DRP, companies will be able to significantly cut the damage and lower the chances of catastrophic data loss.
Likewise, DRP provides improved recovery times, putting the organization in a better position where it becomes much easier and quicker to resume business operations.
3 Enhanced Security
DRP uses frequent data backups along with other security procedures, which strengthens your security posture and limits the number of attacks. For example, with cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, you get built-in security capabilities like advanced encryption, identity, and access management to keep the backups protected from unwanted access.
4 Reduce Recovery Cost
1 out of 8 businesses never recover from cyber-attacks, and 60% of companies who suffer from data breaches file for bankruptcy. The monetary impact of any disaster can be significant, it can range from loss of customers to a complete shutdown of a company. In addition to this, attackers now demand ransom in order to free up the sensitive data which they hold. Companies can avoid these stressful situations and even minimize them to some extent with the implementation of DRP.
5 Long Term Growth
With DRP, businesses are able to find out the changes they need to make in their systems that lead to constant development and improvement. Furthermore, DRP might require you to replace the old backup systems and recovery hardware with new ones, such as cloud solutions. With software-led DRP solutions, you can provide a company with a strong platform on which it can build its growth and resilience.
Conclusion
With a disaster recovery plan, you will be able to keep your data accessible and protected from the bad actors of the internet. Keep in mind if a clear Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) isn’t implemented, then businesses are leaving themselves vulnerable to a number of threats, such as loss of revenue, brand damage, and, most importantly, dissatisfied customers.
To wrap up, we end this blog with one piece of advice. See, DRP might look amazing in theory, but with no practical backing to support its functionality and activation, the DRP will not live up to the expectations during times of crisis. As a result, it is important to collaborate with the best DRP provider such as Embee India and test the DRP before making it go live.
