How to create a disaster recovery plan

If you’ve ever experienced a disruption in your business, you know that the unexpected can strike at any moment — whether it’s a power outage or a cyberattack. Without a strategy to recover quickly, you risk losing data, which could cause service gaps and damage your relationship with customers.

 So, how do you get started? A disaster recovery plan (DRP) can be your roadmap to quickly restore operations and protect your company from the impact of unforeseen events that may interrupt your workflow.

 In this guide, we’ve put together everything you need to build a robust disaster recovery framework that gives you peace of mind that you have strategies in place to recover and minimize any downtime for your business.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of planning and responding to unexpected disruptions — such as natural disasters, technological failures, and malicious activities — to enable the swift restoration of IT systems, data, and operations.

 Imagine if a server crashes and your team can’t access the information they need to fulfill orders. Or worse, ransomware encrypts your data and holds it hostage. These disruptions can happen without warning, and waiting until they occur leaves your cybersecurity and business continuity at risk. A DR plan is about being proactive and documenting recovery procedures, so your team knows exactly what to do when disruptive events happen.

Here are other disaster recovery examples that a plan can address: 

• Events causing physical damage to infrastructure, such as floods, fires, and earthquakes
• Large-scale health crises affecting distributed workforce availability
• Connectivity issues interrupting communication and access to cloud services
• Regulatory changes requiring quick adjustments to workflows
• Accidental deletion of critical files or misconfigurations affecting critical systems
• Cyberattacks and data breaches that compromise business functions

Learn how to effectively navigate the cloud security threat landscape.

Main types of disaster recovery

When creating a DRP, the IT manager or business owner often starts by considering the budget. Understanding the different types of disaster recovery helps you prioritize resources and investments in the areas that would experience the greatest impact from an outage.

Benefits of developing a DR plan

In an outage, every minute counts to preserve your infrastructure and protect information. A DR plan gives you the confidence to make fast decisions that keep your business running.

 Benefits of disaster recovery planning include: 

• Reduced downtime: A report by Splunk shows the average cost of downtime is $400B per year. With a DRP, you reduce the financial impact of extended downtime by establishing clear steps to restore services without wasting unnecessary time or productivity.
• Business continuity: Whether through cloud backup for small businesses or enterprise-grade disaster recovery service, a DRP helps maintain essential processes and keeps your team working. It prepares your organization to adapt quickly by prioritizing tasks, automating data restores, and setting up alternate work environments.
• Enhanced data protection: A DRP incorporates security measures like data leakage prevention and regular backups to protect data integrity and accessibility. Keep in mind that data loss isn’t just the result of system failures or external security threats — a survey by Proofpoint shows careless users lead to data loss in 70.6% of organizations.
• Compliance with regulatory requirements: Regulations like GDPR require organizations to restore access to personal data in a timely manner and follow risk assessment guidelines to remain compliant. A DRP helps you implement safeguards, from file encryption to access controls, to avoid costly penalties or legal repercussions.

How to get started with disaster recovery planning

When designing a DRP, it’s essential to consider how diverse and unpredictable potential disruptions can be. Regardless of the cause, from a flood to a phishing attack, your plan needs to adapt to various scenarios.

 Here’s how to create a disaster recovery plan.

1. Set goals for your business’s disaster recovery plan

In business disaster recovery, the first step is to ask yourself: What do I want to achieve with this plan? For example, if you run a retail company, your goal might be to restore your e-commerce store within hours. Start by defining measurable goals like: 

• Recovery time objective (RTO), which indicates the maximum amount of time critical systems or processes can remain offline before your business experiences delays, customer impact, or compliance risks
• Recovery point objective (RPO), which measures the longest acceptable duration of data loss — calculated from the most recent backup to the moment of failure — without causing significant issues

Make sure these goals align with your business priorities. If you’re in a sector where uptime is critical, such as protecting financial data, aim for lower RPO and RTO.

2. Assess risks and identify critical assets

A comprehensive risk analysis identifies any vulnerabilities that could impact your operations. This step helps you reduce expenses from troubleshooting and lost productivity — according to Logic Monitor’s Outage Impact Survey, businesses that face frequent outages and brownouts experience costs that are 16 times higher and need twice as long to troubleshoot problems than companies with less downtime.

Look at past disasters and recovery incidents within your industry to understand common threats. For example: 

• In retail, think about how system outages during peak shopping periods can disrupt sales and inventory management
• If you work in financial services, consider the impact of data breaches on sensitive customer information and transaction systems
• In healthcare, evaluate how cyberattacks affect patient data and medical records

3. Create disaster recovery strategies

Strategies can vary greatly depending on the size and scope of your disaster recovery process, as well as the complexity of your IT environment. According to Gartner’s survey, backup is the most common strategy for 63% of IT leaders, so a robust backup plan might be your first step.

In addition to backup, a robust cloud-based service should provide: 

• Cloud sync: Updating your content across multiple devices in real time, ensuring everyone has the latest version
• Replication: Duplicating your files to another location, minimizing risk by creating an exact copy for failover
• Offsite storage: Storing backups in a separate location, safeguarding your data against local disasters
• Document version control: Keeping track of changes made to files, allowing you to recover previous versions or identify when and where critical edits occurred

4. Establish a communication plan

An essential part of any emergency recovery plan is to prepare guidelines for communicating with teams, stakeholders, customers, and regulatory bodies, if needed.

 Prepare a detailed program with: 

• Contact information for team members
• A list of alternative communication channels, such as messaging apps or satellite phones, to use if the primary channel is unavailable
• Pre-drafted messages for key stakeholders to save time during critical moments
• Steps to escalate issues if initial responses are insufficient

5. Define your disaster recovery team

A disaster recovery team should include members from various departments with clear roles — but remember to set up a backup group in case someone is unavailable.Select team members based on their expertise. For example, IT specialists will handle system restoration, while heads of departments will focus on restoring customer-facing operations.

6. Perform regular testing and reviews

Your DRP won’t be effective unless it’s tested and updated. Run simulations to assess how your team responds to different types of disasters — regular exercises confirm that your plan works in real-world scenarios. 

 Review your DRP periodically to incorporate new technologies, processes, or business goals. For instance, if your business moves to a hybrid cloud environment and updates the DRP, you’ll enable a quick switch to the cloud infrastructure, keeping your critical applications and services operational.

See the benefits of public, private, and hybrid clouds to find the best fit for your business.

Implement a robust disaster recovery strategy with Box

Box allows you to create, organize, edit, and share content with teams, clients, and partners, anytime and on any device. With our Intelligent Content Management platform, you get data storage, governance, collaboration tools, and AI-powered capabilities to supercharge your workflows, plus much more.

 Box also gives you access to enterprise-grade security features like file encryption, strong user authentication, and threat detection to protect your most important information from breaches and other cyber threats. Plus, you don’t need to worry about losing data — use cloud backup to keep your photos, videos, and documents accessible every time you need them.

 If you experience a data loss incident, Box offers friction-free file recovery using various data centers with reliable power sources. And you can easily integrate your content across 1,500+ applications to keep information up to date and organized, as it should be.

Contact us today and discover how Box can secure your disaster recovery plan.

While we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering products and services with best-in-class privacy, security, and compliance, the information provided in this blog post is not intended to constitute legal advice. We strongly encourage prospective and current customers to perform their own due diligence when assessing compliance with applicable laws.