Earlyface

A disaster recovery plan is a document that outlines the process and procedures, you would use to recover and protect your business’ data in the event of a disaster, bouncing back to resumed operations as quickly as possible.



Data recovery planning enables you to prepare for disasters that are bound to happen like floods, quakes, cyber-attacks and even human error.

It is for this reason that businesses have been seen to use MySQL automatic backup as a precautionary measure for data retrieval upon loss. Even having backed up your data, it is really enough?

It is vital that every business develop a data recovery plan that is well elaborated even to the employees, and discussed here are 5 guidelines that your data recovery plan must adhere to:

Create a Disaster Recovery Management contingency statement

This is the initial step to getting the data recovery plan started.

It is a statement of a formalized set of rules that consent to the development and implementation of the recovery plan in your business.

Conduct a Business Impact Analysis

It is important for a business owner to be aware of the degree of damage any particular loss is likely to cost the business.

The business impact analysis is an in-depth investigation on how much potential risk is bound to be impacted on your business, in terms of downtime losses expected, applications damaged and how long overall business operations will be stalled.

Since IT applications are usually placed at the highest risk, you need to also have a contingency plan for how to navigate through, and this analysis will allow for identification of applications and departments that will have minimal implications on the business at the time of disaster.

Analyze control measures

Control measures are the procedures followed and implemented to reduce threats to the business. They serve as the anticipated solution to minimize the impact of the disaster to the business.

Analyze them on the 3 different levels;

Preventive measures – what can be done to prevent data loss if disaster strikes? For example, banking on automatic backups.

Detective measures – measures that can be put in place to identify threats before they strike the business.

Corrective measures – strategies that will be used to rectify the faults of disaster on data lost for example securing newer devices.

Train your personnel

Like any other disaster management plan, this one requires an informed people to anticipate any disaster that threatens the business.

Train your employees about their role in the data recovery process, like how they should handle hardware devices, saving all the work they do on the cloud, among others.

Test and implement the recovery plan

After considering all applications that are at a higher risk than others, testing is relevant to keep track of any loopholes in the disaster recovery plan, which is the first step towards implementing the plan in the business.

At the end of the day, disaster can only be anticipated, not so much control. It is for this reason that a data recovery plan should be laid out and transparently shared with all the working personnel in a business. With these rules, you cannot go wrong on your recovery planning process.