Earlier this August, Delta Air Lines suffered from an extended power outage that caused 2,300 flight cancellations in just a few days. The Atlanta-based airline company was eventually able to contain the disaster, but the damage left in its wake remains. Delta’s net earnings dropped in the third quarter due to the $150 million loss in damages and service disruptions. Economic damages aside, the airline company also received a wave of customer complaints and reputational damage that no ordinary company can recover from.
Unfortunately, most small- to mid-sized businesses won’t be able to survive the same hit. Extended periods of downtime caused by power outages, floods, fires, or cyberattacks can cripple or even shut down unprepared organizations. So how can your company prepare for any disaster? The answer to this question is a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, and here’s how you can begin.
Account for immediate threats
Before you create a disaster recovery plan, conduct a risk assessment for the most frequent disasters in your area. In an ideal world, you would have insurance for any worldly threat, but a good disaster recovery plan is realistic. In Atlanta, for instance, the chances of city-leveling earthquakes and volcano eruptions destroying your business are almost non-existent. However, hurricanes, floods, fires, and cyberattacks can occur almost every year, and we highly recommend you focus your disaster recovery plan on these incidents first.
In this stage, you should also begin calculating the hourly cost of every aspect of your organization -- from the data that you collect to the hardware and employees you maintain. Doing so will allow you to calculate how much one hour of downtime costs your business and to prepare for the next step of your disaster recovery plan.
Define your tolerance for downtime
The real starting point of your disaster recovery plan is here. Inevitably, there are applications and processes your business can’t live without. Therefore, it’s important to set goals -- or a recovery time objective (RTO) -- for how quickly different systems need to recover to keep you in business.
It’s a good idea to divide your systems into a recovery tier list. The first tier should include mission-critical apps you can’t live without, like your email servers or your infrastructure. The second should cover applications that your business needs within 5-10 hours. And the third tier comprises peripheral devices and ‘luxury’ applications that can be recovered in days.
Next, evaluate your recovery point objective, or RPO. This objective quantifies how much data loss and downtime your business can tolerate until it flatlines. Of course, every business owner would like every system to have an RPO of just a few seconds, but that is often neither technically nor financially feasible. This step is a bitter pill to swallow for most business owners, but just as long as sensitive customer information and crucial business applications have minimal RPO, your business can survive.
Develop your strategy
Once you’ve established your RPOs and RTOs, it’s time to create a response strategy. For many businesses, this means using cloud backups and offsite data centers as a failover in case the main headquarters are not operational. You should also develop a detailed employee communication plan to make sure your personnel knows exactly what is expected of them during the disaster, who’s in charge of recovery, how they should manage disgruntled clients, and whom to contact for technical support.
Give your plan a test drive
Testing your DR plan is just as vital as formulating the plan itself. During the freak power outage, Delta Air Lines failed to recover to a secondary site. Many believed that if the airline regularly tested its failover strategies, it wouldn’t have been in this predicament.
Save yourself from the financial heartbreak and test your DR plan once a month or even once a week, if necessary. Simulate your backup procedures, refine your RPO and RTO goals, and address any issues that arise. The effort you put toward your DR plan today can save your business tomorrow.
Disaster recovery planning is a project often overlooked by business owners until it’s too late. Don’t make the same mistake! Get in touch with us at www.intelligis.com to get your business ready for the worst of the worst.
