How To Test a Disaster Recovery Plan

The things that cause us the greatest disruption are those that are the least expected.

The tragic events unfolding in Texas and the storm that is heading toward Florida are opportune times for us to ask an important question: How quickly would your business be able to recover from a disaster?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say you have no idea.

To be fair, there are a lot of factors that will determine how quickly you can recover from a disaster, including the type of disaster, your type of business, and what type of product or service you deliver. But whether you manufacture screws, sell magazine subscriptions door to door, produce blueprints, or run a print shop – you need to figure it out.

Four Disaster Recovery Planning Questions:

  1. What services do I absolutely need to have to run my business?
  2. How quickly do I need to have my business up and running again?
  3. How will I go about getting the critical services to run my business?
  4. If you have a piece of machinery or application that you no longer have access to, how quickly can you get a second one?

Move Business IT to the Cloud

You may want to consider moving your tech services to the cloud. That is one way to ensure you can get access to many, if not all, of your essential applications quickly.

I’ll leave you with another important exercise: While it may be easiest to plan for a weather-related disaster, there are a lot of other kinds of disasters that can strike. It is worth the time to identify the types of disasters that could potentially cause your business harm and how you can adapt your disaster recovery plan to cover for them.

If you need help building a disaster recovery plan or identifying potential disasters that could impact your business, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help.