How to Build an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan?

Every business at some point faces the risk of a ransomware attack.

Unfortunately, these attacks continue to be more complex as technology advances.

It is considerably more cost-effective to have replication and cloud data backup services than paying a ransom amount and working to repair attacked files.

If you face a ransomware attack, data breach, or catastrophic event that damages your network, a disaster recovery plan will help your business rapidly and effectively recover from the loss.

Data backup and recovery plan is a fundamental risk mitigation strategy for business continuity – one that can be very expensive if ignored.

What is an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

An IT disaster recovery (DR) plan for businesses is an action plan that can be applied in a worst-case scenario catastrophe.

If the worst event occurs, and you are helpless to operate your business operations from your actual location or utilize your business network, an adequate disaster recovery plan will allow you to continue addressing your consumer requirements.

Why should business employers have a disaster recovery plan?

In any case, your business experiences any event of a natural catastrophe or cybersecurity breach. Your business continuity depends on having a DR plan.

Offsite data backup and recovery are basic tasks and critical for all businesses, regardless of their size.

An effective plan should be ready to combat before any disaster occurs.

If any of the following situations, having an IT disaster recovery plan empowers you to continue business operations.

• Your building suffered from a fire disaster, and the business network gets inaccessible for a few days.
• If there is a catastrophic event in your city that turns traveling to your workplace impossible.
• You must operate a business from a different location because of an unanticipated emergency.
• Your business network gets comprised of direct attacks, malware, or ransomware.

A disaster recovery (DR) plan allows your business to:

• Continue business operations even when your building is inaccessible.
• Reduce downtime.
• Protect your customers.
• Continue communicating with employees, vendors, and customers.
• Avoid paying ransomware
• Lessen costs
• Improve customer service

Data Backup and Replication 

A significant part of business continuity and disaster recovery is replicating applications and servers with the data.

At PMTT, we utilize Veeam to deliver the latest image-based replication and secure your sensitive data in any disaster event.

Veeam – a cloud-based data management software that offers data backup and recovery, data management, data protection, and data security.

Incorporating image-based VM replication in your DR plan can help avoid unnecessary data loss and improve your recovery time for all applications and data, reducing the impact on your infrastructure.

By employing a thorough disaster recovery plan, you will have access to the data your business needs to remain in operation, even if your office is inaccessible.

In the event of a disaster, having cloud-based replication as a feature of your disaster recovery plan can be an enormous safety net.

It can provide:

• A duplicate copy of your virtual machine (VM) is in a prepared to begin state, so if a virtual machine goes down, you can quickly failover to a standby VM.
• Enhanced accessibility to virtual applications.
• Image-based replications are on-site for accessibility and off-site for disaster recovery.
• No impact on the production – while performing replication from data backup files.

Create a Disaster Recovery (DR) in 5 easy steps:

Your DR plan should integrate with your business in a method that prevents downtime from disrupting your business continuity, distinguishing: 

Data

What sensitive data do you require to remain operational? 

Location

The locations from which you would operate if your work location comprised.

Communication

Plan on how you would communicate with your team during a crisis. 

Response Stages

Specific response stages need in case of a data breach or ransomware attack. 

What should you include in a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan?

Your DR plan should include secure, cloud-based disaster recovery and offsite data backups.

It should likewise incorporate a plan where employees will meet, how your business will communicate with customers, and strategies you can take to reduce risk and enhance security:

• Evaluate Critical Operations
• Calculate Disaster Situations
• Discover a Communication Plan
• Create a Data-Backup and Recovery Plan
• Test all Your Strategies

Evaluate Critical Operations

In this step, evaluate what operations are critical to the function of your business and how their interruption may impact your ability to operate work.

Operations evaluated based on:

• The kind of products and services you provide to customers
• The extent to which your business should operate from its predetermined location

By better comprehending the vulnerabilities that exist, whether they are explicit to your industry, you can address the transformations that are required to be applied to increase your network safety methodology.

This effort may involve holding meetings with leaders in your company who can help evaluate what risks would impede the operations in their area of expertise.

To secure accountability, you must establish someone on your team to be responsible for planning.

Questions to consider:

• What components of your business are so crucial that you cannot survive without immediate access to them?

• What data or information do you store that, if lost, could jeopardize your customers?

What sensitive business information do you have to protect to manage your position in the industry?

Calculate Disaster Situations

Calculate different disaster situations and how they would impact your business.

How would you respond if a natural disaster required your business to relocate?

What might happen if a cyberpunk encrypted your files and demanded a ransom?

A multi-purpose disaster recovery plan does not work for all situations.

Having your work location damaged by cause of a fire or a catastrophic event requires different protocols than finding a disgruntled employee who has comprised the business security.

Work with all the process leaders within your organization to evaluate all disaster situations and suitable methodology for each type.

By employing this, you will determine your recovery objectives and timeline once hazards of disaster strike.

Discover a Communication Plan

No matter what kind of disaster occurs, a well-planned communication plan is required to ensure your business continuity.

Assign knowledgeable individuals to articulated roles.

For instance, if a fire incident occurred that damaged the building, it may be the maintenance controller’s responsibility to notify the CEO, who may then trigger a cascade of correspondence to be disseminated to the workforce.

Assuming the business should be shut or moved, foster a plan of action for making sure the customers comprehend what has happened, and how to reach out to you.

Assuming phone systems are comprised, make sure someone is assigned to take responsibility for communicating via a social channel and monitoring social media for customers’ inquiries.

Assuming there is an event of a data breach, your communication plan should likewise incorporate both the required regulatory communications and the common public relations communications to assure investors and customers of the actions you are taking to safeguard them.

It must also include emergency contact details for your managed services team, who will assist you throughout the recovery process. 

Create a Data Backup and Recovery Plan

Planning for a natural disaster of any type is fundamental for every business that needs to remain functional; whether a malfunction occurs business server fails, an employee deletes sensitive data, or a dire situation threatens to disrupt your business coherence.

Although the objective is to avoid a breach altogether, cyberattacks are unavoidable.

It is important that you have a plan in place to rectify and limit potential damages.

An effective response plan incorporates a team of IT experts dedicated to fixing the issue, monitoring for the further interruption, and holding the existing data breach. 

Assign Employee Roles

Every employee has a role in maintaining the security of your company. Each employee can have a role in recovery.

You can assign roles by area of expertise or by seniority level. However, every individual should play a part in assisting the organization with recovering. 

Analyze Mission-Critical Data

One of the most significant aspects of creating a company disaster recovery plan is determining what data is crucial to keep the business functional.

Preferably, businesses must create an effective disaster recovery plan that is comprehensive to keep you functional in any situation and adequately adaptable to meet your specific needs.

From customer information to secure processes, from account detail to the current to-do list, your offsite backup must include the data required to continue operating if returning to your work location is not an option.

Such data might incorporate emails, chats, documents, contracts, visuals, tax records, applications, and other necessities to conduct everyday operations of the business.

Establish your plan as a hard copy. Specify what you need to recover and where you would be able to recover it in case your network is altered or comprised. 

Your Plan Must Include:

• A checklist of all sensitive data and equipment required to operate
• Contact details of your 24 hours recovery team (both your in-house team and your managed services team)
• Alternate meeting locations
• Communication tasks and action steps
• Incorporate a checklist of all the required steps that should be applied, and which employee is assigned to handle critical data and ensure their completion. 

Create a Post-Disaster Recovery

The information acquired from any disaster your business has already encountered can be utilized to create a one-step advance response to the next catastrophic event or prevent future breaches.

Every breach offers both the company encountering the breach as well as every other person a token of the significance of proactive safety measures.

If a breach occurs, it uncovers any weaknesses in security exploited by cyberpunks.

Transform your strategy to strengthen the weaknesses that you uncovered. 

Test All Your Strategies 

Once you bring up the DR plan, test all your strategies and plan.

Run an assignment in which a natural disaster occurs or simulate a breach.

Test your in-house team to ensure there are no gaps in your plan.

If you point out gaps in the plan, such as communication gaps, security gaps, or face any other issues, strengthen your DR plan with more advanced steps. 

Data Backups

Traditional onsite physical backups do not provide sufficient protection for your business.

Data backups stored at a physical location are dependent upon the same natural disasters that would give up primary data systems.

Assuming housed locally, they are vulnerable to a similar potential cyber assault as the rest of your IT infrastructure – if managed internally.

Part of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BDCR) must include replicating applications and servers together with the data.

The businesses that store data backups using on-location sites, recovery generally takes a longer time to complete.

Businesses can do more to prepare for a natural disaster or cyber-attack and expand their proactiveness to ensure a quick recovery.

These five stages will assist you with further developing your disaster recovery planning.

In the past years, there’s been an explosion of coordinated ransomware attacks striking various businesses.

• In 2019, there were more than 10 known ransomware attacks, and there have been threats on hospitals, Government entities, and businesses around the world.
• In 2020, the Ragnar Locker ransomware encrypted multiple companies’ systems and demanded a ransom of nearly $10million. The attackers claimed that they stole about 10TB of sensitive company data.
• In 2021, ransomware threat actors attacked software supply chain companies to subsequently – compromise and extort their clients.

Data breaches that occurred over the past years have emerged in Personally-Identifying Information (PIN) to be uncovered about the users – from Yahoo to Facebook to LinkedIn.

Even if your organization might not do business with one of these associations, your workforce does.

Employees are often the biggest risk to your business because the credentials they use for their social channels or individual data found there may likewise be the credentials they use to access your network.

These incidents feature something we stated repeatedly:

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BDCR) planning are critical to all businesses, regardless of their size.

Every business faces the real possibility of a natural disaster that could compromise its information integrity and threaten its existence.

Preeminent Technologies provides essential IT support to businesses. We offer fully managed and personalized services designed to address the needs of virtually any business. Our IT team will work with you to customize and tailor a cost-effective solution and help you establish a comprehensive IT security technique that will help you combat any threat, whether natural or human-caused error.

Contact here to set up a Disaster Recovery plan today!