Published 2025-06-02 by TechNet New England
An IT disaster recovery plan (DRP) outlines how your organization will respond to and recover from major disruptions: cyberattacks, hardware failures, natural disasters, or any event that takes critical systems offline. Without a plan, you are leaving recovery to chance.
Why You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan
- Minimize downtime and financial losses
- Protect your reputation with customers and partners
- Meet compliance requirements for your industry
- Reduce stress and confusion during an actual emergency
- Ensure critical business functions can continue
Building Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Step 1: Risk Assessment
Identify what could go wrong and how likely each scenario is:
- Natural disasters (fire, flood, storms)
- Cyberattacks (ransomware, data breach)
- Hardware failures (server crash, storage failure)
- Human error (accidental deletion, misconfigurations)
- Utility failures (power outage, internet outage)
- Vendor or service provider failures
Step 2: Business Impact Analysis
For each system and process, determine:
- How critical is it to operations?
- What is the cost of downtime (per hour, per day)?
- What is the maximum acceptable downtime (RTO)?
- How much data loss is acceptable (RPO)?
- What are the dependencies on other systems?
Step 3: Recovery Strategies
Define how you will recover each critical system:
- Backup procedures and locations
- Recovery hardware (hot site, cold site, cloud recovery)
- Alternative communication channels
- Manual workarounds if systems are unavailable
- Vendor support contacts and escalation paths
Step 4: Document the Plan
Your DRP document should include:
- Emergency contact information for key personnel and vendors
- Step-by-step recovery procedures for each scenario
- System dependencies and recovery order
- Communication plan for employees, customers, and stakeholders
- Roles and responsibilities during recovery
- Criteria for declaring a disaster and activating the plan
Step 5: Test the Plan
Testing validates that your plan actually works:
- Tabletop exercises: Walk through scenarios verbally with key staff
- Simulation tests: Practice recovery procedures without affecting production
- Full failover tests: Actually fail over to backup systems to validate recovery
Test at least annually, and after any major changes to your infrastructure.
Step 6: Maintain and Update
A disaster recovery plan is a living document:
- Review and update after every test
- Update when systems, staff, or processes change
- Ensure backup contact information stays current
- Incorporate lessons learned from incidents
Common DR Planning Mistakes
- Creating a plan but never testing it
- Storing the only copy of the plan on systems that might be unavailable
- Not including communication plans
- Underestimating recovery times
- Forgetting about dependencies between systems
Disaster recovery planning takes time upfront but saves immeasurable pain when something goes wrong. Contact TechNet New England for help building or improving your disaster recovery plan.