A Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan is a document that outlines how an organization can get back to full operations following an unplanned incident, this includes things like hurricanes, earthquakes, fires or an unexpected cyber-attack. Having an unexpected disturbance can have a huge impact on smaller companies, 40-60% of small businesses that lose access to operational systems without a DR plan go out of business. 93% of companies without disaster recovery who suffered a major data disaster were out of business within one year. Despite their numbers, 75% of small businesses have no disaster recovery plan objective in place, which makes them extremely vulnerable.  Proper planning is essential to ensuring the longevity of your business, and it doesn’t need to be something extremely complex for it to be effective. Simply having a good data backup and a documented method of recovering from that backup would allow 90% of companies to recover from ransomware attacks. Here I offer some tips on how to develop a good disaster recovery plan:

Create a team specifically to design the plan

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan you want to assign individuals to a team and make that team responsible for the document’s creation and upkeep. This way you have someone to hold accountable and it avoids confusions.

Identify Your Necessary Assets

This means making a list of the assets your business needs to remain in operation. This includes a list of physical assets like buildings, machines, equipment or even company data. But it can also mean things like intellectual property or key employees. The defining factor here is anything that your company can’t operate without, even for a short period of time. 

Identify Potential Disasters for each asset

For each asset you want to identify the potential risks to it, this could include earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, political unrest, cyberattacks etc. You want to make this as comprehensive as possible and consider the specifics of your business such as your industry, location, competitors etc. While this can be exhaustive, you want to have a tailored plan for at least the top five disasters (ranked by likelihood) for each asset you have. 

Create a plan to protect your assets in each Scenario

Now that you have a list of assets and potential disasters, you need to come up with solutions for each of these potential scenarios. This can be done in many ways but a simply way is to create a table.

Make a plan for your employees

Firstly, you need to identify leaders that will be extensively trained on what to do and how to help other employees follow the plan properly. During certain types of disasters the people that worked on the plan might not be able to communicate with everyone for various reasons so its important to have people trained that will be able to carry out the plan in your absence. Then you want to come up with plans for relocating your employees if need be and allowing as many of them as possible to continue working to keep the business going. The easiest way to do this is to allow your employees to work from home, this would allow anyone to continue working unless there is a nationwide or citywide disaster.

Create a communication plan

You need to come up with multiple ways of communicating during an emergency. Its not uncommon for communication to fail during a natural disaster and you want to have multiple methods of communication so that if one fails, you are still able to contact your employees and let them know what’s going on.  Additionally, its important to regularly update your contact information and backup contact information so that you know the best way to contact your employees. Typically, its best to have a system were people can update their information themselves and simply give them reminders every 6 months or so to update any information that has changed. You may also want to have print offs of important contact information since email and other electronics might not be available. 

Find an alternative business location

Its important to have alternative business sites in case your main building or work space is not available. You can do this is in different ways, some are more expensive but are faster to start using while others are cheaper but will require more work to become operational in the event of an emergency. For a small business this may not be an entire building, it might just be an office space where the key people in your business can go to and continue to work and keep the business up and running until you figure out a long term solution.