How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

Losing sensitive data is any organization’s worst nightmare. However, the quickest way to recover after any type of disaster – from cyberattack to hurricane to building fire – is to have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place outlining the company’s approach to crises.

And in our opinion, the most important aspect of the BCP is the IT disaster recovery plan. In this article we’ll highlight the key features of the IT disaster recovery plan and how to go about creating one.

What Is an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

The IT disaster recovery plan (IT DRP) is a documented process used to outline the recovery path of IT infrastructure in case of disaster.

An IT disaster recovery plan is the lynchpin of organizational business continuity strategy. It maintains (at least) a minimum level of service while restoring the usual operations. When businesses fail to implement an IT DRP, they risk losing reputation, funding, and customers if/when disaster strikes.

Why Is IT Disaster Recovery So Important?

The overarching benefit of an IT DRP is that it dictates detailed, accurate, simple, and up-to-date information about your organization’s IT operations. This document should have a coherent format and be easily consumable for employees, allowing them to be ready to take actionable steps when necessary.

A solid IT disaster recovery plan can help your organization:

• Minimize interruption to normal operations and establish alternative operations to utilize if necessary.
• Limit the extent of a cyberattack or natural disaster.
• Train staff in emergency procedures.
• Cut costs regarding relief efforts.

These types of preventative measures will reduce the risk of a man-made disaster and, hopefully, improve your customer service by reducing the risk of downtime and securing customer care (and retention!) after a disaster.

How to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan

Building an IT DRP requires research, a strong understanding of your organizational processes and risks, and coordination with stakeholders. The plan should be tested and continuously updated by relevant team members.

Consider the following suggestions when creating and testing your disaster recovery plan:

• Include the processes for contacting support and escalating issues. This information will help to avoid prolonged downtime.
• Evaluate the business impact of every application failure. This will allow you to prioritize work needed in case of emergency to minimize the business impact.
• Choose a multi-region or multi-cloud recovery architecture for mission-critical applications.
• Identify one specific owner of the disaster recovery plan, including automation and testing.
• Document the process, particularly any manual steps. Automate the process as much as possible.
• Establish a backup strategy for all reference and transactional data, and test backup restoration regularly.
• Train operations staff to execute the plan.
• Perform regular disaster simulations to validate and improve the plan.

5 Steps to Create a Successful IT Disaster Recovery Plan

1. Identify Critical Operations

Begin by identifying the business operations that are critical to the functioning of your organization. Outline the following:

• Comprehensive list of processes, services, and products you provide.
• Any known vulnerabilities that could impact your organization.
• The extent to which you must operate from your company’s headquarters.

Determine what data is crucial to keep your business operational in any situation. Consider including the following in your data backup plan:

• Business-critical data and assets
• Alternative meeting channels
• Crisis and post-disaster communications
• Proactive security measures

Next, determine the priority level of services and products with the following classifications:

• Absolutely mission-critical: The major revenue generators requiring the least downtime possible, measured in minutes or hours.
• Semi-important services and products: Minor revenue generators with larger acceptable downtimes.
• Low-tier services and products: Little to no revenue-generating impact. These might have a downtime of several hours to days with little or no impact on the mission-critical services and products.

Each tier should have its own SLA (Service-level agreement) detailing potential downtime losses and explaining how the risks will affect business operations and growth. Emphasis should be placed on two key elements:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable time that your services and products can be offline.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.

RTO and RPO can be set differently for every application, as it should reflect the business importance of every application.

This effort may require various meetings with leaders and executives who can help identify what risks would impede operations in their department. To ensure accountability, we recommend establishing someone on your team responsible for the planning process, which includes defining the essential elements of your business, the sensitive data assets, and a financial plan to maintain disaster recovery.

2. Evaluate Disaster Scenarios

A one-size-fits-all IT DRP doesn’t necessarily work for all scenarios. That’s why it’s critical to evaluate a variety of scenarios, from cyberattacks to natural disasters, review how they impact your business and how to react to each,  and formulate several DR plans.

Here are a few examples of the types of disaster scenarios your IT DRP could/should cover:

• Cyberattacks (ransomware, data breaches, DDOS attacks)
• Hardware or software failures
• Natural disasters (fire, hurricane, Datacenter destruction)

We recommend working closely with department leaders to identify possible scenarios and formulate procedures for each. This will give you a big-picture overview of your recovery objectives, timelines, and processes.

3. Create a Communications Plan

In the case of disaster, it’s critical to keep staff, suppliers, business partners, stakeholders, and customers informed of your responses and actions via a thoughtful and efficient communications plan.

As a first step, we recommend defining clearly articulated communications roles. If you’re a small team, you’ll likely appoint just one person (often the business owner, though it’s wise to also identify a backup) to be in charge of all disaster/recovery communications. Within a larger organization, there may be a larger comms team assembled with a variety of disaster-related roles.

With the increase in remote and hybrid work environments, ensure your communications plan includes virtual tools (such as Slack or Microsoft Teams) for instant team coordination and cloud-based platforms for real-time updates.

When developing a communications plan, consider using a few possible disaster examples, such as:

• Example #1: Building fire. In the case of fire/fire damage, you’ve assigned the maintenance supervisor with the responsibility of notifying the CEO. CEO then triggers a cascade of communications to be disseminated to staff.
• Example #2: Natural disaster (e.g. hurricane). In this case, daily operations will likely need to be moved to another location. Assign a POC to ensure customers are communicated with and know how to get in touch regarding questions/concerns.
• Example #3: Data breach. Your communication plan should include the required regulatory communications (example of GDPR) and appropriate PR communications to assure stakeholders and customers of your actions to protect them.

Finally, create a task list using a who/what/when format, along with the audiences that should be contacted. Messaging about the situation should be honest and clear, outline consequences, and highlight the action steps you take in response. Prepare templates for press releases, website notifications, emails, and social media to ensure your plan can be implemented without delay.

4. Develop a Data Backup and Recovery Plan

For an IT DRP, these three elements should be addressed:

• Emergency response procedures: Outline the appropriate emergency responses to a fire, natural disaster, or other activity to protect lives and limit damages.
• Backup operations procedures: Steps to ensure that essential data processing operational tasks can be conducted after the disruption.
• Recovery actions procedures: Steps to facilitate the rapid restoration of a data processing system following a disaster.

Following the identification of a disaster incident, a documented set of procedures will help carry out the disaster recovery strategy. The DRP should be in accordance with the already established RTO and RPO standards.

Multi-cloud disaster recovery strategies, in particular, offer greater flexibility and resilience, reducing reliance on a single provider. Both automated and manual processes should be neatly documented, but modern IT DRPs increasingly rely on automation and cloud-native solutions for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

It’s critical that all recovered data be in an operational state at the end of the disaster recovery procedure.

The extent of the appropriate IT DRP  for your enterprise will depend on your BIA (Business Impact Analysis). It might be one of the following:

• Pilot light: A minimal, always-on environment in another region that can quickly scale to take on full production traffic in the event of a disaster. This approach is common in cloud environments, where only the most critical components are continuously running, reducing costs while still enabling rapid recovery. Often, this most critical component is a database that has data replication turned on but the applications are not running to save costs.
• Multi-cloud disaster recovery: Instead of relying solely on traditional cold or warm sites, many organizations now utilize a multi-cloud strategy. This involves replicating applications and data across multiple cloud providers, offering increased resilience and flexibility. It also mitigates the risk of provider-specific outages and provides global failover capabilities.
• Active-active or hot standby: In a fully cloud-native setup, multiple regions or providers may be active at once, sharing traffic during normal operations. If one region or provider goes offline, the other can seamlessly take over without any downtime, ensuring continuous availability for mission-critical applications. The main difference between this and Pilot Light is that here, the applications are up and running in the disaster recovery site and are able to handle the incoming traffic right away.

As organizations review the options for a given application as well as the impact of cost and budget, it is common for the IT DRP to be updated and changed over time.

5. Plan, Test, Repeat

Once you’ve developed an IT DRP, we highly recommend testing it regularly to ensure it remains effective and up to date. Focus on technical things while testing and procedural, e.g., who can give access to the database when needed.  Consider using AI-powered or automated testing tools. These advanced solutions simulate real-world disaster scenarios, including cyberattacks, hardware failures, and natural disasters, allowing you to stress-test your recovery plan under a wide range of conditions.

AI-based simulation tools can help identify potential vulnerabilities more efficiently and offer predictive analytics to adjust your recovery strategy before a disaster occurs. These tools also enable continuous testing and monitoring, ensuring that your IT DRP evolves alongside changes in your infrastructure and threat landscape.

The secret to a strong IT DRP lies in regular reviews and updates, especially when hiring new people, connecting with new suppliers, or expanding to new locations. Ensure that essential data and contact details are always up-to-date.

Prevention is Better Than Cure: Work With Newfire

At Newfire, we understand that protecting your business from unforeseen disasters requires more than just a recovery plan—it demands a proactive, integrated approach to security and resilience.

With our strong DevOps practice and a deep expertise in Data and AI, we build software products and solutions with safety and security at their core. Whether it’s optimizing disaster recovery processes with AI-powered automation or developing multi-cloud architectures for increased resilience, we ensure that your business stays operational, no matter the crisis.

Partner with us to secure your trajectory and scale your business safely.