Good stewardship includes preparing for disasters that can interrupt the enterprise. These 20 steps connect disaster recovery with business continuity, testing, communication and the controls that keep critical work moving.
- Write and maintain a disaster recovery plan that explains what to do during a disaster.
- Identify the systems and applications that need immediate attention during a disaster.
- Back up critical data on a regular schedule and store the backups offsite or in the cloud.
- Test the backups so you know the data can be restored.
- Write and maintain a business continuity plan that keeps critical operations running during a disaster.
- Create a communication plan for notifying employees, customers and stakeholders.
- Build redundancy into critical systems and applications to avoid single points of failure.
- Use monitoring and alerting tools to detect system failures and other critical events.
- Automate failover and recovery where possible to reduce downtime.
- Maintain a disaster recovery testing plan and run it regularly.
- Build relationships with vendors and suppliers who can help during a disaster.
- Train employees on disaster recovery procedures and their responsibilities.
- Document every disaster recovery procedure and keep the documentation current.
- Establish a designated disaster recovery site for restoring critical systems and applications.
- Use virtualization to provision replacement servers and applications quickly.
- Set recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for critical systems and applications.
- Run regular risk assessments to identify disaster scenarios and mitigation strategies.
- Use access controls and security measures to protect critical data from unauthorized access.
- Keep disaster recovery and business continuity policies aligned with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
- Review and update both plans regularly so they remain practical and current.