Disaster recovery planning is one of those things that every business knows they should do and most businesses put off until something bad happens. Don't be that business. A well-designed disaster recovery plan (DRP) is the difference between a bad day and a business-ending event.
What Is Disaster Recovery Planning?
Disaster recovery (DR) planning is the process of creating documented procedures to restore IT systems, data, and operations after a disruptive event. "Disasters" in this context include not just natural disasters but cyberattacks, hardware failures, human error, power outages, and any other event that causes significant IT disruption.
Key Concepts: RTO and RPO
Before building your plan, define your recovery objectives:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) — How long can you be down? RTO is the maximum acceptable time from failure to restoration. A 4-hour RTO means your operations must be restored within 4 hours of an incident.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — How much data can you afford to lose? A 1-hour RPO means you must back up at least every hour, because you can't afford to lose more than 1 hour's worth of work.
Your RTO and RPO drive every technology decision in your DR plan — more aggressive objectives require more investment in infrastructure.
The DR Plan Framework
1. Risk Assessment
Identify the threats most relevant to your business and location. For Cleveland businesses: power outages, severe weather, ransomware, hardware failure, and key person dependency are typically the highest-probability risks.
2. Business Impact Analysis
Document which systems and processes are most critical to operations. Rank them by business impact. Your DR plan should prioritize restoring the most critical systems first.
3. Recovery Strategies
For each critical system, document the specific steps to restore it, including:
- Where backups are located and how to access them
- Step-by-step recovery procedures
- Alternative systems or manual workarounds if full recovery will take longer than the RTO allows
- Vendor contacts and account credentials needed for recovery
4. Communication Plan
Who needs to know when a disaster occurs? Create a contact list — staff, customers, vendors, insurance, legal — with clear protocols for who communicates what and when.
5. Testing
A DR plan that's never been tested is a theory. Run tabletop exercises (walk through a scenario on paper), partial tests (restore specific systems from backup), and full DR tests (simulate complete failure and execute the entire recovery) on a regular schedule.
Common DR Plan Gaps
- Plans that exist as documents on servers that are down during the disaster
- Outdated procedures that don't reflect current systems
- No documentation of where credentials and license keys are stored
- Plans that assume key personnel are available (what if your IT person is on vacation?)
- No testing or testing that hasn't been done in more than a year
Build Your Plan with Zirkle Tech
Zirkle Tech helps Cleveland businesses build practical, tested disaster recovery plans that match their actual risk profile and budget. We'll work with you to define your RTO/RPO, document recovery procedures, implement the right backup and DR infrastructure, and conduct regular testing. Contact us to get started.
