If your business relies heavily on its IT infrastructure – and that includes a large swathe of small and medium-sized businesses now, as well as larger enterprises – an outage, power failure, or cyber-attack can cause severe operational disruptions. Much of business IT security policy rightly focuses on prevention rather than cure. But sometimes, with the best preparations in the world, the unexpected sometimes strikes. In these cases, does your business have the systems and protocols in place to respond quickly and effectively to restore your business operations?
In this article, we will look at the importance of a disaster recovery plan and how it can minimise your losses and help your business get back on its feet with minimal disruption.
IT disasters come from a variety of sources and causes, with disruption ranging from minor inconvenience to catastrophic system failure. As more and more economic interactions are moved online, a growing range of business processes become vulnerable to IT disruptions. These include cyberattacks using ransomware, data breaches, accidental data loss, and distributed denial of service attacks. Hardware failures can compromise your servers and data storage devices, and computer hardware is perennially vulnerable to floods, burglaries, power cuts, and other external threats. And let’s not forget good old-fashioned human error, in which an employee accidentally deletes or overwrites an important file, with cascading effects throughout your system.
These risks now affect almost all businesses, thanks to the widescale adoption of hybrid working patterns, cloud-based applications, and storage devices by SMEs of all sizes. Despite this, however, many businesses still lack a fully worked out protocol to handle an IT emergency. Without a fully tested disaster recovery plan, you could face prolonged downtime, significant financial losses, and an inability to fulfil your operational commitments to your customers.
There are several key components of a good business disaster recovery plan, which work together and concurrently to facilitate a rapid recovery in the worst-case scenario, as well as strengthening your prevention measures.
The shape of a disaster recovery plan is influenced by the specific threats that face the individual business, so start by identifying the risks that most threaten your IT systems, and their likely impact should they occur. Which scenarios are the most likely to disrupt your operations? For example, if you hold significant personal data on your customers, a ransomware attack on your CRM could cost you thousands or even millions in non-compliance fines with the Information Commissioner’s Office for breach of data protection regulations. Or, if your business depends on a cloud-based project management platform, a prolonged power outage at a data centre – completely outside of your control – could interrupt services for your customers for hours or even days.
Regular data backups are the keystone of any effective disaster recovery strategy. Many businesses think that they already do regular backups, but in practice these are nowhere near as regular or robust as they might believe. Once every few months, once a week, or even daily are no longer sufficient. Ideally, businesses should implement incremental or real-time backups to minimise data loss during a security event. Where these backups are stored is important, too. In some situations, we recommend a 3-2-1 approach to protect your data across multiple points, with three backups in total, two stored locally and one off-site. You’ll also need to periodically restore your backups and test them to ensure that they remain functional and free from errors.
Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are two essential criteria when establishing objectives of your recovery strategy. The RTO defines the acceptable downtime duration before your operation must resume, while your RPO defines the amount of data your company can afford to lose, measured in time. The higher the cost of IT downtime in your business, the lower each of these factors will be. An independent electrician, for instance, might afford several days of IT downtime before it realistically affects his business, whereas an e-commerce business might face unacceptable losses when the RTO exceeds two hours.
The previous three considerations will shape the type of disaster recovery infrastructure you need. Fortunately, modern IT hardware and software give businesses various options for creating a bespoke disaster-ready IT landscape. For example, secondary systems or cloud-based environments can create a failover solution that automatically activates during an outage at your physical premises. Some businesses also implement redundant systems within their network connections, data storage systems, and power supplies to reduce the potential points of failure. And finally, some IT managed service businesses offer Disaster Recovery as a Service, using a third-party platform that mirrors or replicates your business infrastructure. Available on a subscription or pay-as-you-go model, depending on the vendor, this can be a cost-effective alternative to investing in physical infrastructure yourself.
When an IT incident or disaster unfolds, clear and rapid communication is just as important as having the right technical safeguards in place. It is therefore important to define clear responsibilities and establish communication workflows among your team and any IT MSPs and third parties you are working with. ‘Is this a disaster or not?’ Good question. Your communication and response plan should clearly define the different risk thresholds and the actions to be implemented when certain conditions are met. Identify who is responsible for declaring a disaster event and who will initiate the disaster recovery protocol, and the channels through which employees, customers, and other stakeholders will be advised of the issue and what to expect.
Many businesses have a disaster recovery plan that looks good on paper but hasn’t actually been stress tested, so there is no guarantee of how well it will perform should adverse circumstances arise. To avoid this risk, it’s important to simulate various disaster recovery scenarios to evaluate how your plan performs under pressure. Review and update the plan regularly to account for any new threats, business changes, and emerging technologies.
Get in touch with the team at Vantage IT today to find out more about disaster recovery and how to protect your business from a range of IT disasters and threats.
01/12/2025
