Disaster recovery teams face unique challenges, even among their like-minded IT or risk-focused peers. They’re responsible for anticipating potential threats, responding to new ones as they emerge, and building comprehensive plans that account for the technologies, people, networks, and assets that keep the organization running.
From surprise cloud outages to ransomware attacks and third-party slip-ups, businesses need to be prepared and ready to respond to disruptions. And with the global economy more connected than ever, the stakes are high. The legacy practices of handling disaster recovery for IT systems are too slow, too static, and too siloed to keep up.
Traditional IT disaster recovery plans are often built on spreadsheets, static documentation, or one-off scripts. Updating, validating, and executing these plans can take weeks – far too long in the face of a fast-moving disruption.
It’s time to rethink your approach. Whether you’re building your first modern IT disaster recovery strategy or looking to improve your existing program, this checklist will give you a practical roadmap to navigate 2025 with confidence.
1. Understand What Matters Most, and How it Works
Start by figuring out which parts of your business are absolutely critical, and how all the different services within are most aligned to business priorities. Ask yourself:
- How does the organization operate?
- Which services can you not afford to go down?
- What pieces of your tech infrastructure are vital to operations?
- Which users and clients are most important to get back online?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you need to understand how each element works, both independently and as part of the larger ecosystem. Map out the systems and infrastructure that support them. This way, when disruption occurs, you know where to start by putting systems and applications back together.
2. Map Your Dependencies in Real Time
No system runs alone. Make sure you understand how everything connects to support the business: apps, servers, vendors, users, customers, and so on. A clear view of how systems, services, and teams work together helps you create better plans so your team can respond more effectively to disruptions. Using a solution that delivers visibility across your organization and continuously monitors for gaps can accelerate your planning and help you get back on track in the event of a disruption.
3. Set Recovery Goals That Match the Business
Work with your business teams to define how quickly, and in what order, things need to be back online (the recovery time objective, or RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose (the recovery point objective, or RPO). These goals should reflect the real-world impact of downtime, and you should work to sequence each step of the process in a way that fast-tracks recovery.
4. Design Scenario-Based Exercises
Skip the cookie-cutter tests. Build scenarios that reflect the kinds of incidents you’re most likely to face and use the dependencies you’ve already mapped to create the simulations with as many variables as you can. The more real they feel, the better prepared your team will be.
5. Test More, Stress Less
Manual disaster recovery tests are time-consuming and resource intensive. Many organizations avoid running them entirely due to the burden they add to their teams. Automate testing where you can so you can run more frequent, realistic data simulations without draining your team’s time. Scenario testing, including dependencies, is critical to understanding where your current posture falls short.
6. Get Everyone on the Same Page
Use dashboards or scorecards to track how ready you are and where you might be vulnerable. Share those insights across teams so there are no surprises when things go wrong. Use these dashboards to prove the efficacy of your program to executives and other key decision makers.
7. Tear Down the Silos
Don’t let IT disaster recovery live in a vacuum. Connect it with your business continuity and risk strategies. When these areas talk to each other, everyone is better prepared. Resilience is not a single team’s responsibility; the entire organization should be involved in achieving it.
8. Make Ownership Crystal Clear
When a crisis hits, who’s doing what? Make sure roles are clearly defined and that responsibilities span across IT, risk, and business functions. Everyone should know their part in the playbook.
9. Stay Ready for New Kinds of Threats
From AI glitches and insider threats to ransomware the list of digital threats is only growing. Your IT disaster recovery plans need to keep up and anticipate these new scenarios and be prepared to adapt on the fly when a new threat emerges.
10. Keep It Compliant
With regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, and the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) stepping up their game, compliance isn’t optional. Your IT disaster recovery process needs to be audit-ready from day one. Stay aligned with frameworks like NIST and document everything.
Disaster Recovery for a New Era of Disruption
Despite the growing urgency for preparedness, many organizations remain stuck with legacy IT disaster recovery approaches that are too slow, disconnected and reactive. They may check the box, but they are likely to fail under real-world pressures.
Disaster recovery isn’t just a once-a-year checkbox anymore. It’s an ongoing effort that must evolve with your business and the risks surrounding it. Future-ready IT disaster recovery solutions are aligned with global resilience mandates, enabling continuous audit-readiness, transparent documentation and faster response to regulatory inquiries.
The best way to get your organization ready for what’s to come is to start planning now, and never stop. To learn how you can maximize your team’s disaster recovery efforts with Fusion, reach out to our team today.
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