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What is a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan?

It is important for an organization to outline an IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plan to quickly handle incidents, reduce downtime, and lessen financial and reputational damages.
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What is a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan?

It is important for an organization to outline an IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plan to quickly handle incidents, reduce downtime, and lessen financial and reputational damages.

Cybercrimes have become more sophisticated, natural disasters occur around the world, and other unplanned disruptive events happen more often than organizations would like. Businesses need to create detailed instructions to resume operations, resume mission-critical functions, and to minimize the effects of an incident.

It is important for an organization to outline an IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plan to quickly handle incidents, reduce downtime, and lessen financial and reputational damages. A step-by-step DR plan will aid in your business continuity efforts and should be created before any disaster occurs.

What Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Include?

As suggested by IBM, the following steps will help you prepare the information needed for a great DR plan. Once you have outlined the information needed, you should keep this plan in a safe, accessible location off-site.

  • Step 1: Goals – List the major goals of a disaster recovery plan.
  • Step 2: Personnel – Record your data processing personnel and include a copy of the organization chart with your plan.
  • Step 3: Application Profile – List all critical and fixed asset applications.
  • Step 4: Inventory Profile – List all infrastructure including the manufacturer, model, serial number, cost, and make note if the items are owned or leased.
  • Step 5: Backup Procedures – Itemize how and when you backup your data and where information is stored, saved, or changed to.
  • Step 6: Disaster Recovery Procedures – You should address the following 3 elements:
    • Emergency response procedures in the event of a fire, natural disaster, or any other incidents to protect lives and limit damages.
    • Backup operations procedures to ensure data processing tasks can be conducted in the aftermath.
    • Recovery actions procedures to facilitate rapid restoration of data after an incident occurs.
  • Step 7: DR Plan for Mobile Site – Include a mobile site setup plan, a communication disaster plan with wiring diagrams, and an electrical service diagram.
  • Step 8: DR Plan for Hot Site – Include an alternative backup site plan and system for temporary use while the home site is being reestablished.
  • Step 9: Restoring Your System – Use procedures on recovery you outlined in Step 6 to completely restore your network to the way it was before the incident occurred.
  • Step 10: Rebuilding Process – The IT staff or managed IT services partner must assess damages and begin reconstruction of a new data center.
  • Step 11: Test the DR Plan – It is important to test and evaluate the DR plan regularly because frequent changes to equipment, programs, and documentations occur often.
  • Step 12: Disaster Site Rebuilding – Include a floor plan of the data center with square footage, power requirements, security requirements, the current hardware needs, and possible alternatives.
  • Step 13: Record of Plan Changes – Keep records of changes to your configuration, applications, backup schedules, and procedures to keep your DR plan current.

I.T. Matters Has a Disaster Recovery Plan for You

I.T. Matters can create a DR plan that is a perfect fit for your business. We also test and audit it periodically so that nothing slips through the cracks. We make sure that our clients have a continuity plan that allows them to get back up and running as quickly as possible following natural disasters, hardware failures, or even human errors.

We use Datto as a DR solution for critical infrastructure systems. This solution provides:

  • Complete Backup Management System
  • Encrypted Backups
  • Appliance-based with Cloud Services
  • Spool-up Production Environment Locally or via Cloud on Secured Servers
  • File-Level Restore
  • Export Virtual Servers
  • Increment Backups Any Time You Want
  • 24/7/365 Code Red Emergency Support

I.T. Matters is here to make sure you have the right security measures in place. We want to help you with your DR plan and our solutions will help you recover from an incident as quickly as possible while minimizing damaging effects. To assess your DR plan and work on your business continuity, call us at (281) 280-8500 or send an email over to [email protected].


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