So far, we’ve discussed 3 disaster recovery best practices in this series: Getting a thorough business impact assessment (BIA), finding experienced DR/BC planners and project managers, and investing the appropriate resources, budget and time. Here are two more best practices for protecting your business continuity.
Emergencies often disrupt the usual lines of communication— your phone systems may be down, your primary carrier may be out, or your cellular carriers could be swamped by traffic. Additionally, people may scatter during an emergency, so you need to plan how employees will communicate after a disaster.
Make sure you include alternative means of communication in your disaster recovery plan. If possible, try to offer multiple communication options. This step also includes gathering the appropriate phone numbers, web addresses, and contact information. Finally, make sure you communicate this information to everyone in your company.
Hopefully, you’ll never have to see your disaster recovery plans in action. You definitely don’t want to wait until a disaster to find out how well you planned, however. Test your disaster recovery plans in advance—thoroughly and often.
Generally, you should expect to test the entire plan at least once a year. If anything changes between these annual tests, you should revise the parts of the plan these changes might affect. Then be sure to test the complete plan before the regularly scheduled test.
Our final blog post on this subject will explore one last disaster recovery best practice – Keeping your plans accurate and up to date. Come back again soon!
