Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters can happen to any company and they come in many forms and severities. They can be anything from a natural disaster, to a well-meaning employee accidently downloading a destructive virus, to something vital getting mistakenly deleted. These what-ifs can keep you up at night, so for your own reassurance develop a disaster recovery plan.

Decide What’s Important

The first step is knowing what you have and what’s important. Take an inventory of all the data that is critical for your organization to run. This will lead you to the data that should be backed up. Using an online provider or the cloud to store all of your data is one way to ensure data recovery if your hard drive crashes and burns.

Make a Plan

The second step is figuring out the steps that must be taken to get your company back on its feet as quickly as possible. Think about the worst possible scenario and the way to recover from that. Which systems must be restored first and what technology will be needed to do this?

Know Your Workflows

While you have the big picture of how your organization runs, you almost certainly don’t know each and every process everyone does. Have your employees document the processes and workflows they perform to complete tasks for the company. In case of something tragic, anybody can read the process document and preform an important task.

Decide Who is in Charge

Many people panic when disaster strikes. To make sure the panic doesn’t make things worse, put someone that has helped you create the plan in charge of carrying out your data recovery plan. This way you are available to reassure everyone and manage the company and you can be the strong leader your employees need in time of crisis.

Disaster can happen to anyone! So before it does, develop a good plan so that you know what to do. It will make both your employees and you feel more secure.