How do you evaluate IT disaster scenarios?

1 Define your critical assets and processes

The first step in evaluating IT disaster scenarios is to identify and document your critical assets and processes that support your business goals and functions. These include your hardware, software, data, network, applications, services, and workflows that are essential for your operations. You should also map out the dependencies and interconnections between these assets and processes, as well as their owners, users, and service level agreements. This will help you understand the potential impact of a disruption or loss of any of these components on your business continuity and performance.

2 Assess the risks and vulnerabilities

The next step is to assess the risks and vulnerabilities that could affect your critical assets and processes. This involves analyzing the sources, types, and frequency of potential threats, such as natural hazards, human errors, malicious attacks, technical failures, or external events. You should also evaluate the existing controls and safeguards that you have in place to prevent, detect, or mitigate these threats, such as backups, firewalls, encryption, antivirus, or monitoring systems. Based on this analysis, you should assign a probability and a severity score to each threat scenario, reflecting the likelihood of occurrence and the magnitude of impact on your operations.

3 Prioritize your recovery objectives

Once you have identified and scored the potential IT disaster scenarios, you need to prioritize your recovery objectives based on your business needs and expectations. This involves defining the maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and the recovery point objective (RPO) for each critical asset and process. The MTD is the maximum amount of time that your business can afford to be without a specific asset or process before it causes unacceptable losses or damages. The RPO is the maximum amount of data that your business can afford to lose in the event of a disruption or loss of a specific asset or process. These objectives will help you determine the order and urgency of your recovery actions and resources.

4 Develop your recovery strategies and plans

Based on your recovery objectives, you need to develop your recovery strategies and plans for each IT disaster scenario. This involves identifying and documenting the steps, roles, responsibilities, and resources required to restore your critical assets and processes to their normal or acceptable state. You should also consider the alternative or backup solutions that you can use in case of a failure or unavailability of your primary solutions, such as cloud services, redundant systems, or manual procedures. Your recovery strategies and plans should be aligned with your business goals and functions, as well as your stakeholders and customers' expectations.