A Disaster Recovery Plan Ensures Business Continuity During Crises

2020 has been a year of crisis. The global pandemic has represented probably the most significant global crisis since World War II. And the challenges posed by Covid-19 have affected businesses around the world. The hospitality, tourism and entertainment industries have probably been the hardest hit, but none have been totally spared.

If you are a business with a strong digital presence your website represents your main revenue stream and acts as a marketing funnel for potential customers. It's critical that your website runs reliably at all times.

A website disaster recovery plan can help your business respond to website crises as and when they develop, whatever their cause, so that your business can bounce back from a disaster as quickly as possible.

Whatever the extent that your business has been impacted by Covid-19, by implementing a disaster recovery plan you’ll be able to face any challenge that 2021 throws your way.

7 key elements of a disaster recovery plan

Below we’ve listed the key areas your DRP will need to address in order to ensure recovery is swift and substantive.

·        Investigation checklist

-        What is down?

-        Why is it down?

-        Who is responsible?

·        Scenarios – define potential disasters and how to tackle them

·        Appoint a recovery team

·        Train your staff on correct responses

·        Contact list

·        Acceptable service loss

·        Backup frequency 

Draw up an investigation checklist – before you can tackle the effects of the disaster, you must first define the causes. By working backwards from the impacts of the disaster you can trace who or what is responsible and put failsafes in place so that it can’t happen again. 

Backup frequency – with frequent website backups you’ll be able to restore your site to full functionality pre-crisis quickly and easily. You’ll need to decide how frequent you think each update should be. Sites which frequently publish large amounts of content might choose to backup more frequently, whereas websites with a lesser amount of content may get by on less frequent backups. Keeping your website backup separate from your website server will ensure that you have multiple points of failure.

Define likely scenarios – scenario planning allows an organisation to foresee the most likely disasters which could befall their website and to prepare a plan of recovery to respond. By scenario planning your organisation will be able to respond with reparative measures more quickly and effectively.

Choose your recovery team – assigning responsibility and ownership to employees throughout your company will ensure that every team member knows their role in recovering your website when the worst happens. When individual ownership is understood by employees there will be less miscommunication and confusion, and your disaster recovery plan will be unleashed efficiently. 

Train your staff on ideal responses – this point is closely connected to the previous step. Your disaster recovery team will lead the charge when restoring your website’s functionality, but the responsibility to enact it will fall on the shoulders of many members of staff. Ensure they are all well trained in the actions they’ll need to perform depending on the scenario your disaster takes. Keep these responses clearly detailed in your DRP, so staff can access them when they need a refresher.

Create a key contacts list – it’s important to have a list of ‘in case of emergency’ contacts you can call on when a disaster strikes your website. This could include your hosting provider, or your customers to alert them to the situation. Creating a clear list of who needs to be contacted when a disaster occurs in your DRP will get you on the track to recovery more quickly and ensure important stakeholders aren’t kept in the dark.

Acceptable service loss – how long can your business cope with service loss? You will need to make a decision on how long it will be before a loss of service starts having serious consequences. This enables an organisation to set a timeframe on when to act to turnaround a disaster.

Perfect your disaster recovery plan

Whether your brand already has a disaster recovery plan needing a few tweaks, or if you require some further guidance to create a robust plan, send me a direct message today and we'll discuss your requirements.