Disaster Recovery Plan Development

If the worst happens, does your organization have a Disaster Recovery Plan to restore operations and computer systems?

Let Eagle guide you through this important preparation.

In today’s perpetually-connected world, computer systems and critical information are vulnerable to a wide range of disasters:

Sample WannaCry Ransomware Screenshot

Cyber attack, such as ransomware or other hacking
Software failures leading to information corruption
Hardware failures
Human error
Physical destruction due to fire, flood, tornado, or other natural disaster
And more!

A Disaster Recovery Plan is Your Ace-in-the-Hole

With a good Disaster Recovery Plan, even if something bad happens, your team will know what to do. You will be able to restore operations quickly. You will recover most if not all of your critical data. Your organization will be back up and running.

Laptop Burning On the other hand, if the worst happens without a good Disaster Recovery Plan, your organization could face…

crippling costs,

weeks or months of downtime, or

going out of business!

Disaster Recovery Planning Makes A Difference

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DR Plan) is a written, detailed, and tested plan for restoring the IT capabilities and critical electronic information of an organization when a disaster scenario occurs. Specifically, a good DR Plan specifies the actions an organization will take prior to a disaster and the actions during and after the disaster to recover quickly.

In brief, preparing a DR Plan involves the following process:

Establishing the planning team of management, stakeholders, and experts.
Documenting the computer network(s) and critical systems, assets, and data sets.
Identifying possible disaster scenarios and their likelihood of occurring. This should include everything from hardware failure to a ransomware attack to a tornado destroying the data center.
Establishing recovery priorities, including the organization’s expectations for how quickly systems should be restored (called a Recovery Time Objective, or RTO) and how much data from before the disaster the organization is willing to lose (called a Recovery Point Objective, or RPO, which informs the frequency of backups). This usually involves some negotiation, because improvements in RTO and RPO cost money.
Developing strategies for prevention, mitigation, and recovery in order to meet the priorities from above.
Implementing those strategies.
Detailing everything in a written plan, which is then disseminated in digital and hard copy to key stakeholders.
Testing the DR Plan to make sure it will work during a real disaster. The plan isn’t done until it is tested. Testing validates that all key steps are included and that recovery can be done. Testing finds the gaps, the missed steps, and fixes them.

Create a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your Organization

If the worst happens, does your organization have a DR Plan ready?

Is that plan detailed, written, and regularly tested?

If not, contact us to start developing one today!

Eagle Consulting Partners has experience preparing DR Plans for a wide range of organizations. Let us guide your team through this critical process.