IT Disaster Recovery in 2025: A 10-Step Checklist
Learn 10 essential steps to modernize your IT disaster recovery strategy in 2025 and improve testing, visibility, and response speed.
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What is IT disaster recovery?
IT disaster recovery — often referred to as ITDR — is an aspect of business continuity focused on the timely restoration of IT systems and data after a disruptive event. Virtually every business today depends heavily on technology and data to operate, so when IT is compromised for any reason — a cyberattack, a weather event, a third-party malfunction, etc. — the situation is critical and must be remedied immediately. Every second counts.
Those responsible for IT disaster recovery strive to ensure that data is regularly backed up to safe locations and that systems have dependable fallbacks. They use two crucial metrics:
- Recovery time objective (RTO): This is the maximum length of time your company can tolerate an outage of a particular system.
- Recovery point objective (RPO): This is the maximum data loss your company can tolerate, measured in time. In other words, if data more than 15 minutes old is unacceptable, you need to safely back your data up more frequently than every 15 minutes.
Why is IT disaster recovery necessary?
Remember the CrowdStrike IT outage in 2024? A faulty software update made Windows systems crash around the world. Flights were delayed, banks and retailers couldn’t process transactions, and hospitals couldn’t access their schedules. The CrowdStrike incident was a perfect example of why IT disaster recovery is necessary.
In today’s world, no business can afford a technology disruption. Not only are technology and data essential for operations, but the moment you encounter an IT issue, the world starts watching closely. Your customers begin losing trust, and your reputation begins to wane. Whether you’re a bank, a hospital, a manufacturer, or a retailer, you simply can’t afford for your technology to go down for any significant length of time.
Additionally, many businesses need to adhere to regulations requiring IT disaster recovery plans, and noncompliance can result in fines and other repercussions.
What problems does IT disaster recovery solve?
IT disaster recovery prevents and mitigates a host of problems. Primarily, it keeps system downtime and data loss to a minimum. But this, in turn, solves many potentially devastating resulting problems, including:
- Interruption of operations, impairing your company’s productivity and profitability
- Confusion within your organization about how to respond and move forward
- Reputational damage, which can happen quickly and powerfully, thanks to social media
- Fines for noncompliance when regulators take note of your insufficient preparation
Without IT disaster recovery, your company can suffer catastrophic impacts on revenue and resources, employee morale, and your pool of current and potential customers.
How do you implement IT disaster recovery?
Your IT disaster recovery team will need to:
- Perform a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify your most crucial technology systems.
- Conduct a risk assessment to name the greatest threats to your prioritized IT and data.
- Establish your two recovery metrics: (1) a recovery time objective (RTO), the greatest amount of time your company can sustain a particular IT system outage, and (2) a recovery point objective (RPO), the maximum data age you can tolerate if you have to revert to a backup.
- Strategize and create a disaster recovery plan that clearly spells out the process to follow should disruptions occur.
- Practice, test, and update your disaster recovery plan regularly. An unfamiliar or outdated plan is a useless one. It’s important to remain vigilant about keeping your plan effective.
To facilitate and continuously oversee these IT disaster recovery efforts, many companies use specialized business continuity management software.
How does Fusion help with IT disaster recovery?
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 disaster recovery plan
- Accelerate your scenario testing and simulations
- Manage communication during an incident
Fusion can also integrate with your IT service management (ITSM) system to give you truly cohesive oversight of your IT.
Get a closer look at our IT disaster recovery solutions
Discover how Fusion’s ITDR solutions can transform your overall IT disaster recovery strategy, making your organization better prepared and better able to maintain your customers’ trust