Disasters are no longer defined simply by acts of nature. Nowadays, a localized electrical failure can crash global communications and bring online transactions to a sudden halt. Modern businesses rely on worldwide networks, web applications, and 24x7x365 customer call centers, making continuous operation an absolute necessity. When an unplanned outage strikes, your organization needs a reliable way to maintain alternative processes and keep IT systems running smoothly. That’s where a disaster recovery (DR) checklist is important.
Building a comprehensive DR checklist ensures you are completely prepared for unexpected disruptions. Evaluating potential risks and the direct impact on each application is the key to understanding your organization’s specific requirements. This guide will walk you through prioritizing your workloads and establishing a recovery strategy that protects your revenue, reputation, and data.
What to Do Before Starting a Disaster Recovery Plan
Before detailing the specific steps of your disaster recovery plan, you need to completely evaluate your current IT infrastructure. Creating a resilient strategy requires understanding exactly how downtime will impact your daily operations. Here are some questions to ask.
How will an unplanned outage affect our business?
Identify exactly which applications and data sets your team uses every day. Evaluate how your organization would operate without access to data from each specific application. If a core system goes offline, you need alternative workflows in place to keep your team productive.
What dependencies do our applications have?
Software rarely operates in isolation. Document what these applications depend upon to function correctly. This includes underlying databases, Domain Name System (DNS) configurations, and critical web services.
What are your compliance and regulatory requirements?
Different types of data require different levels of protection and retention, and enterprises in different industries need to adhere to various governance and compliance protocols. Document the specific regulatory and compliance frameworks that govern your data. Knowing how long specific information must be retained will heavily influence your backup storage requirements and security protocols.
The Seven Steps for Building a Disaster Recovery Checklist
Once you understand your environment, you can begin constructing an actionable disaster recovery plan. Follow these seven essential steps to build a checklist that prepares your organization for the unexpected.
1. Conduct a comprehensive IT inventory
Review your entire infrastructure to ensure that all backups are completing within their required timeframes. A complete inventory guarantees that your backup schedule actually meets your business recovery and operational requirements.
2. Prioritize your applications
Not all applications carry the same weight. Determine which software is absolutely essential to keep the business operational. Time-sensitive applications require the fastest recovery times based on the latest copy of your data. Assign priority levels to each application to dictate the order of recovery during a crisis.
3. Define and update RPOs and RTOs
For disaster recovery planning, it’s critical to set a specific Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for each application or application group. The right RPO is critical in measuring how much data an organization can afford to lose in an outage. This directly translates into how frequently you need to back up your systems and data. An RTO determines how long an application can be down, dictating how soon after a failure you need to be recovered and back online. Choose aggressive, near-zero RTOs for applications directly tied to revenue generation.
4. Review security and network bandwidth
Data grows exponentially over time. This continuous expansion leads to huge demands on your network, storage, and management resources. Regularly review your network bandwidth to ensure your infrastructure can handle rapid data replication and mass recovery processes without bottlenecking.
5. Conduct routine testing
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its last successful test. Test your backups, applications, and recovery procedures regularly. Frequent testing is the only way to guarantee you can actually meet your stated RPO and RTO targets when a real outage occurs.
6. Document the continuity plan
Create and maintain a highly detailed business continuity plan. Your disaster recovery checklist should be a part of this overarching plan. Once documented, communicate this plan clearly to all key business stakeholders. Everyone must understand their specific roles and responsibilities during a disaster event.
7. Continually conduct reviews
Technology and business needs constantly change. Reassess and test your business continuity plan as often as needed. Regular reviews ensure your disaster recovery strategy aligns with evolving business priorities and new compliance mandates.
How can 11:11 Systems help you simplify Disaster Recovery and DR planning?
Disaster recovery is continually changing, but your organization can still be fully prepared, especially with help from experts. 11:11 provides the most advanced platform, technology solutions, and consulting services to address your organization’s specific needs. With nearly two decades of disaster recovery expertise, we have solutions that go far beyond simple backup. For example, 11:11 Systems is a four-time, consecutive “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
So what should you do if you want more than a disaster recovery checklist for your DR planning? Check out some of our resources or take our free disaster recovery assessment to provide some help getting started. You can also sign up for a free DRaaS trial to get a feel for how our solutions work. We have the complete, secure cloud disaster recovery solution that any organization needs for current and future data protection.
We’d also like to dive more deeply into your strategy. For example, why it’s so important to have separate disaster recovery and cyber recovery plans. More on that later.
Additional Resources:
The Essential Guide to Cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery
