How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan for Server Failure: Minimizing Business Disruption

An IT system has numerous crucial components that affect your system and your business operations. Even if you invest in the most reputable server components and systems, you should always be prepared for inevitable hardware failure, especially if you have a long-running server system. That is why you must know how to create a server disaster recovery plan.

Suppose your business suffers hardware failure or any other related disaster. You want to establish a recovery plan as soon as possible to avoid missing out on business or incurring losses. It would also be wise to have a disaster recovery team on standby to ensure all your backup data and most essential systems are regained promptly. The only way to mitigate the damages of a server outage is by having a sound disaster recovery plan in place.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Every business requires a disaster recovery plan in this digital age. Downtime can lead to huge losses or missed business opportunities, irrespective of whether you run a small, medium, or large business. A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a plan in writing detailing how your business would respond to various disasters that cause technological downtime. This plan designs effective strategies to help your business restore applications, data, and hardware to meet its needs. A DRP should outline specific tasks to be assigned to your staff and prioritize restoration efforts. Basically, you will be putting up a backup system to allow for your business to keep running as you work towards recovering your data.

It is also important to note that conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is crucial to developing an effective Disaster Recovery Plan. This will help you understand the disasters your business is likely to face and their impact. Business Impact Analysis allows you to gauge the probability of certain risks and evaluate the measures you can take to prevent the disaster or cushion your business from its perils. You can prioritize your most reliable responses and estimate how much the disaster will cost your business.

Situations to Consider for a Disaster Recovery Plan

Contrary to popular belief, your disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to revolve around data failures, such as your whole data center being cut off by a natural disaster. It can include any situation that might create an emergency for your business, including equipment failure and persistent DDoS attacks that could cripple essential customer systems. As such, you must ensure your DRP is detailed enough to cover many likely scenarios; this way, your business operations will be spared or cushioned in case of a disaster.

To attain a foolproof Disaster Recovery Plan, your Business Impact Analysis must consider the following hardware and data perils, among other possible disasters:

• Natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, etc
• Water leaks
• Power outage
• Prolonged cyber attacks
• Hardware failure
• Data loss
• Network outage

Disaster recovery isn’t just about responding after the fact; it also involves in-depth investigations on how to avoid disasters entirely or at least mitigate their impact for the good of your business. Although there are many options you can use to protect your data, we highly recommend developing a data backup strategy since it is way more effective. Your strategy must begin with identifying the most crucial data to be protected with reliable backup techniques to implement it. You should also verify the effectiveness and scheduling of your routine backups to ensure you don’t lose any data.

How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

There are numerous DRP templates online that can help you set up a reliable disaster response system. You can follow the following steps to develop one for your business:

Determine the Primary Goals for Your DRP

Your most immediate goals when it comes to disaster recovery should be:

• Establishing an alternative operation means before the disaster strikes
• Minimizing the financial impact of the disruption
• Limiting the extent of damage or interruption to your business
• Minimizing the interruption of primary business operations
• Training key personnel on emergency responses
• Providing a smooth and prompt service restoration

Take an Inventory of All Your It Applications and Hardware

You must have an up-to-date inventory of your most essential software and hardware, including the specifications necessary to repair them and contact information for vendor support. Your inventory must include the manufacturer of your hardware, serial numbers and model, ownership status, and cost.

They say failure to plan is planning to fail. So, if you take away anything from this post, let it be how crucial it is to conduct a risk analysis of your business’s systems before a disaster strikes.

• Likewise, you can also consider reading: Cybersecurity Tips to Protect Your Data and Minimize Breaches While WFH