A disaster recovery plan will help to ensure your business continues to function when disaster strikes, and you can recover as quickly as possible. Developing a disaster recovery plan in advance is essential as it will allow you to prevent many lost hours in the early stages of an attack when rapid action is critical.

When Disaster Strikes You Must be Ready for Action

When disaster strikes, you need to act fast to get your systems back online and return to normal business operations. One of the biggest problems for many organizations, is the amount of time that is lost immediately after a cyberattack is discovered. When staff are scrambling around not knowing what to do, precious minutes, hours, and even days can be lost.

The first few hours after a cyberattack can be critical. The time it takes to respond can have a significant impact on the cost of mitigating the attack and the harm caused. In the case of ransomware, that could be movement within your network, with one infected endpoint becoming two, then 4, then 8 and so on until files on your entire network are encrypted. Each lost minute can mean hours of extra work and major productivity losses.

The only way to ensure the fastest possible response is to be prepared for the unexpected. That means you must have a disaster recovery plan formulated that is easily accessible and can be followed by all staff involved in the breach response. Staff not responsible for recovery must be aware how they must operate in the absence of computers and critical systems to ensure the business does not grind to a halt.

Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan

There are many potential disaster scenarios. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tornados can cause major disruption, as can terrorist attacks and sabotage. The most likely disaster scenario in the current climate is a cyberattack.

All of these disaster scenarios threaten your systems and business data, so your disaster recovery plan must ensure your systems are protected and the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data is safeguarded while you respond.

While the threat may be similar for all scenarios, priorities will be different for each situation and the order of actions and the actions themselves will be specific to different threats. It is therefore essential to plan for each of the likely disasters and to develop procedures for each. For example, your plan should cover a cyberattack affecting each specific location that you operate, and a separate plan developed for a ransomware attack, malware infection, and system outage.

Assess Business Impact and Set Priorities

A cyberattack could take out multiple systems which will all need to be restored and brought back online. That process could take days or weeks, but some systems must take priority over others. After your disaster recovery policy has been developed, you must set priorities. To effectively prioritize you will need to perform a business impact analysis on all systems. You should conduct a BIA to determine the possible financial, safety, contractual, reputational, and regulatory impact of any disaster and assess the impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. When the BIA has been completed, it should make it clear what the priorities are for recovery.

Everyone Must Know Their Role

When disaster strikes, everyone in the IT department must be aware of their responsibilities. You must know who will need to be called in when the attack occurs outside office hours, which means you must maintain up to date contact information such as phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. You will also need to have a list of contractors and cybersecurity firms that can assist. You must know which law enforcement agencies to contact and any regulators or authorities that should be notified. All employees within the organization must be aware how their day-to-day activities will change and the role they will play, and what you will say to your customers, clients, and business associates.

Testing, Testing, Testing

You will naturally have developed a disaster recovery plan and emergency mode operations plan, but those plans rarely need to be put into action. You therefore need to be 100% sure that your disaster recovery plan developed a couple of years previously will work as planned. That is unlikely unless it is thoroughly tested and is regularly updated to take hardware, software, and business changes into account.

Your disaster recovery plan must be tested to make sure that it will work in practice. That means testing individual aspects against specific scenarios and also running through a full test – like a fire drill – to make sure that the whole plan works.

Don’t wait until disaster strikes before developing a disaster recovery plan and don’t wait for a disaster to find out all of your planning has been in vain as system changes have rendered the plan unworkable.