Disaster strikes — a natural disaster, a fire, a malicious attack — but it’s okay because you have a disaster recovery plan in place.
At least, you think it’s okay. But if that disaster happens and your business is on the line with an out-of-date disaster recovery plan, you could be in rough shape.
A disaster recovery plan is important. Having gone through the process at least once is a great start. But if your plan is not ready to go, accurate, and still applicable to your business and its operations, you could end up wishing you had taken the time to tweak your plan.
How Often Should You Update?
Of course, we cannot update our disaster recovery plans every single day. And, we cannot stretch updates out to the point that our plan is useless when the time comes. The key is to find the frequency that suits your company’s needs, while ensuring that you take special precautions any time there is a major change to your operations.
Reviewing and updating your plan annually is a good start. For many companies, more frequency is required than that. Quarterly reviews and updates are even better, ensuring that you are checking in with your plan on a regularly scheduled basis.
Outside of the regularly scheduled update and review, pay attention to scenarios that should trigger a special review. If your business moves, staff change, you buy or replace hardware or software, or legal compliance requirements change, review your plan and make updates as necessary.
How to Review and Update Your Plan
Check over every aspect of the plan, large and small. For example, you should have contact information for key personnel and agencies. If that is out of date, change it! It seems like a small detail but can make all the difference in acting quickly when you need to.
Make sure that your backup systems and processes still work, and test them as if there were a real disaster. Something that looks good on paper might turn out to be useless in real life, which you can only find out through testing.
Our services and solutions include backup and disaster recovery, both onsite and offsite. If you are developing your disaster recovery plan, or working to update and test the one you have in place, our IT expertise will keep your company airtight.