Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses

Chapter 12. IT Strategy

Disaster recovery begins when the actions to minimize IT damage become a structured effort. Guide your employees through this process, and then scope out the remaining work and the responsibilities of your employees to complete the recovery effort.

If you prepared carefully, most of the "daily" disasters, like human error, equipment, and third-party failures, will be satisfactorily addressed during your immediate reaction to the event. The recovery portion then focuses on fixing some loose ends, documenting and analyzing the impact of the disaster, and determining how it can be avoided in the future. Over time, you will learn how to handle these small crises more efficiently. Update your procedures often in order to be consistent with the current best practices in disaster recovery.

When you are undergoing a major disaster, your recovery time can jump from minutes to days to months. You may have to rebuild your whole company from the bottom up. The recovery effort then becomes a full-fledged project that requires organization, planning, and project management around the prerequisite that you maintain core business operations for which you need particular IT support. It is critical to get all systems running in normal operation mode in the shortest amount of time possible. You won't be able to devote your resources to system upgrades or enhancements. Your goal is to establish some normalcy to your business operations as soon as possible. You have to take careful ...