Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Take Precautions Now

Are your IT systems ready for an emergency?

Disruptions rarely announce themselves. To safeguard business continuity during outages or disasters, organizations need a holistic, regularly tested strategy. The following ten measures establish a solid foundation for resilience and rapid recovery.

10 Measures for Effective Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

Identify critical processes, dependencies, RPO/RTO targets, and the systems and data you must restore first to avoid material impact.

2. Create a Formal Emergency Plan

Document roles, responsibilities, decision paths, and runbooks for different incident types (power loss, ransomware, network outage, data corruption). Include communication, evacuation, backup, and recovery steps.

3. Data Backup and Recovery

Implement regular, versioned backups with the 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two media, one off-site/immutable). Test restores frequently to verify integrity and recovery time.

4. Redundant Infrastructure

Eliminate single points of failure using failover clusters, replicated storage, multi-AZ/region deployments, and secondary connectivity paths to keep services online.

5. Alternative Workplaces

Define remote work procedures or standby offices so teams can continue operations when primary locations are unavailable.

6. Training and Awareness

Regularly train staff on incident procedures, phishing resistance, and crisis roles. Run tabletop exercises to validate understanding.

7. Continuous Monitoring and Testing

Use monitoring and alerting to detect issues early. Conduct DR tests and game days to validate plans and adjust based on findings.

8. Third-Party Agreements

Set SLAs with providers (network, hosting, SaaS) and verify their business continuity capabilities. Ensure contracts cover priority support during crises.

9. External Communication

Prepare templates and channels to inform customers, partners, and regulators. Communicate status, actions, and realistic timelines clearly and consistently.

10. Regular Review and Updates

Update DR/BC documents as your infrastructure, suppliers, and risks evolve. Reconfirm ownership, contacts, and escalation paths after organizational changes.

Strengthen Your Security Posture

Human factors are often the entry point for incidents. Complement DR/BC with security awareness and incident-prevention practices. See our guide on
phishing awareness and incident preparedness.