Shaping the Future of IT Recovery Through Modern Disaster Planning
Read this whitepaper to explore how to create a business-aligned IT recovery program that reduces downtime and builds resilience.
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What is an IT disaster recovery plan?
As the name suggests, an IT disaster recovery plan (IT DRP) is a plan to follow when your company suffers an information technology disaster. Its purpose is to guide the speedy restoration of your IT systems and data and minimize the impact of the disruption.
An IT disaster recovery plan clearly spells out:
- The steps to follow in order to quickly recover data and restore IT functionality.
- The roles and responsibilities of every person participating in the recovery.
- The communication plan for notifying everyone—including employees, vendors, and possibly the media—of what is happening. Plan participants also need to be notified of their tasks.
An IT DRP depends on two important numbers, which you need to determine:
- Your recovery time objective (RTO): This is the maximum length of time your company can tolerate an outage of a particular system.
- Your recovery point objective (RPO): This is the maximum data loss your company can tolerate, measured in time. In other words, if data more than ten minutes old is unacceptable, you need to safely back your data up more frequently than every ten minutes.
Why is an IT disaster recovery plan necessary?
Your IT is the backbone of your business. Without its functionality, everything halts and quickly falls apart. To keep your customers happy, to maintain the trust of your partners and stakeholders, to simply remain profitable, you must keep your IT operational.
Unfortunately, your business faces a multitude of potential disruptors: cyberattacks, software malfunctions, or even physical threats like flooding and fires. You need to anticipate and plan for every scenario so that when trouble arises, you’re ready to leap into action, minimize the impact, and return to normal functionality as quickly as possible.
What problems does an IT disaster recovery plan solve?
You can probably remember several incidents that have demonstrated the value of a good IT disaster recovery plan.
The year 2024 alone saw multiple disruptive events. A cyberattack took down Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform (including Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn) around the globe. A separate Meta outage rendered Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads inaccessible. And who could forget the CrowdStrike IT outage, when a faulty software update made Windows systems crash worldwide, disrupting operations for airlines, banks, retailers, hospitals, and others?
A solid IT disaster recovery plan keeps system downtime and data loss to a minimum, solving a variety of problems, including:
- Interruption of operations, which impairs your company’s productivity and profitability.
- Confusion within your organization about how to respond and move forward.
- Reputational damage, which can happen quickly and exponentially, thanks to social media.
Fines for noncompliance when regulators take note of your insufficient preparation.
How do you implement an IT disaster recovery plan?
The “plan” is really a multitude of plans that can be followed depending on what kind of disruption happens.
“Implementation” is more than simply following the plan. It begins with anticipating needs and then progresses to developing, testing, and improving your plans.
IT DRP implementation includes:
- Performing a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify your most crucial technology systems.
- Conducting a risk assessment to name the greatest threats to your prioritized IT and data.
- Establishing your two recovery metrics:
- Recovery time objective (RTO), the greatest amount of time your company can sustain a particular IT system outage.
- Recovery point objective (RPO), the maximum data age you can tolerate if you have to revert to a backup.
- Strategizing and creating the IT DRP itself, clearly spelling out the processes to follow should disruptions occur.
- Practicing, testing, and updating your IT DRP regularly. An unfamiliar or outdated plan is a useless one, so you have to remain vigilant about keeping your plan effective.
To facilitate and continuously oversee these IT DRP efforts, many companies use specialized business continuity software.
How does Fusion help with IT disaster recovery plans?
As the leading platform for business continuity and resilience, Fusion can help you to:
- Centralize and streamline your IT disaster recovery planning
- Map your dependencies and identify your vulnerabilities
- Spot gaps in your IT disaster recovery plan
- Accelerate your scenario testing and simulations
- Manage communication during an incident
Fusion can also integrate with your ITSM system to give you truly cohesive oversight of your IT.
Strengthen your IT resilience
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