5 key steps to establishing roles for disaster recovery

When disaster strikes, it’s important to have the right people to execute your disaster recovery plan effortlessly. Disaster impacts everyone, but it’s especially crippling if you’re a small or medium-sized business (SMB) that doesn’t have the available resources to get your company back up and running quickly like a large corporation. Research shows that cybersecurity attacks have tanked 60 percent of small businesses within six months. It’s also alarming that ransomware attacks launched over a 12-month period have impacted one in every five SMBs.

Whether it’s a natural disaster that takes your systems down or it’s a savvy hacker who exploits a vulnerability in your network, preparation is key to ensure your company meets compliance requirements. That’s why it’s important to have guidelines for establishing disaster recovery roles. Use these best practices to get it done:

1. Identify key business and operations stakeholders.

From the CIO to the IT managers, it’s critical to identify stakeholders who are important to the business and operations of your company. These stakeholders help you through the disaster recovery planning process by identifying important services, infrastructures and systems that are essential for recovery so you know which ones should be prioritized, especially for data backup purposes. They also help you identify the maximum time your systems can stay down before it impacts the core business negatively. Also, these stakeholders help with finding and fixing errors and oversights.

2. Find a disaster recovery planning expert.

If you want to reduce your chances of experiencing disaster recovery failure, then it’s key to get help from experts. That’s where a disaster recovery planning expert comes in. When you use an experienced disaster recovery planning professional, you’ll get the expertise you need to resolve crisis-related issues and help to prevent future problems. A disaster recovery expert provides you with insight on the origin of the source, helps you identify vulnerabilities and provides suggestions while helping you adhere to compliance requirements. You can use the help of a managed IT services team, such as Visual Edge IT, to help you manage your disaster recovery on a continuous basis, including providing 24/7 monitoring, patch management, intrusion detection and ongoing consulting.

3. Plan out the delivery of network and infrastructure with the right team.

To ensure your network and infrastructure is operating efficiently, you need to leverage key team members who can help with planning and testing your systems and data backups. These key players can point out the capabilities of your network and communications and what you’ll need to ensure that they are operational in the event of a disaster. Identify the important members of your networking and infrastructure team, voice or IT departments who can help with this process.

4. Consider support staff.

Your business needs assistance with training key stakeholders and drafting important content for your disaster recovery plan. You should have a team handling communications, such as your human resources or PR manager. You may also get assistance from a forensics investigator and advice from legal counsel to investigate the source of data breaches and potential litigation.

5. Include recovery phase roles.

It’s also important to include recovery phase roles and clearly define each role’s responsibilities. These include staff members in charge of business continuity and disaster recovery and those responsible for bringing the system back up, such as the IT systems and services personnel. Your IT help desk also plays an important role in providing round-the-clock support in the event of an emergency.

Gather your team.

Knowing whom to contact in the event of a disaster is crucial to business continuity. By forming key roles for your disaster recovery team, you can ensure a successful recovery of your infrastructures, networks and systems.