In today’s digital world, technology disruption for even a few hours can result in significant financial consequences to your business. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. (That’s more than $300,000 per hour!) For large organizations, that number tops half a million dollars.

It’s no wonder that having a well-designed and effectively maintained disaster recovery plan in place will substantially increase your ability to recover lost data and return to normal operations as quickly as possible.

So, let’s look at strategies for developing a disaster recovery plan that will protect your organization.

(This article is part of our Security & Compliance Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Business Continuity Planning vs Disaster Recovery Planning:

Business continuity planning (BCP) and disaster recovery planning (DRP) are sometimes used interchangeably. And while they are interconnected, the two are different concepts:

• Business continuity planning is the overarching strategy that covers the entire company to ensure that mission-critical functions can continue during and after unforeseen events. Such events could include natural disasters, death or illness of a company executive, a security breach, and more.
• Disaster recovery planning is actually a subset of overall business continuity that helps ensure organizational stability following an impact to IT only. Examples include disruption to servers, desktops, databases, applications and so on.

(Compare business continuity to business resiliency.)

Goals of disaster recovery planning

When crafting the right disaster recovery plan for your business, it’s important to first assess the goals you’d like the plan to accomplish. The purpose of the DR plan is to protect users and the business from financial, legal, privacy and security related repercussions of a disaster incident.

Let’s look at the key reasons to plan for disaster recovery.

Mitigating risk

To contain the extent and scope of the disaster impact. Conduct a thorough risk assessment and evaluate various targets. Design the DR plan to isolate mission-critical systems and streamline the risk mitigation and remediation pipeline.

Reducing disruptions

Service availability is critical to business success. A primary goal of a DR plan is to ensure that systems return to normal and optimal performance soon after downtime. Metrics such as Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) should be optimized within disaster recovery planning.

Reducing economic impact

Prioritize MTTR of IT assets based on the perceived business value. An optimal disaster recovery strategy is focused on:

• Systems that directly impact the cost of downtime
• Critical services such as infrastructure and healthcare applications
• The wide extent of the user base

Preparing for disasters

Getting ready for disasters waiting to happen. Cyberattacks are getting more sophisticated by the day—which means you can always improve your ability to handle the next wave of security threats.

Understanding cybersecurity posture

Cybersecurity is hard. It is time and resource intensive. You need to:

• Get started with the right cybersecurity strategy
• Secure the most important IT assets
• Identify new vulnerabilities
• Patch zero-day exploits as soon as they are found

It’s also important to neither overestimate nor underestimate your cybersecurity strength. Understanding your cybersecurity posture helps optimally allocate resources to prepare for and respond to disaster incidents when needed.

Achieving regulatory compliance

Organizations should be well prepared in adapting to the changing regulatory environment. A disaster recovery plan should be a part of the compliance strategy as it alleviates risk and provides a systematic approach to recover from disaster situations. Critically, compliance is mandatory for organizations in certain industries, including:

• Healthcare
• Finance
• Defense
• Infrastructure

(Understand governance, risk & compliance, known as GRC.)

Maintaining brand loyalty, reputation & user trust

Internet users today are increasingly aware of their rights to data security, privacy, and control. A DR plan ensures that your users maintain access to their data even when disaster strikes.

As a result, service providers maintain trust and brand loyalty necessary to survive the competitive Internet market landscape.