How do I make a plan for disaster recovery maintenance?

Create a disaster recovery maintenance plan with forethought, duplication of power sources, and preventive maintenance testing. Although it’s challenging to consider what potential disasters may look like, planning for one is critical. A good disaster recovery plan may mean the difference between staying in business and not.

Forethought and Planning

An effective disaster recovery plan must begin way before a disaster occurs.

If you run a data-dependent business, you’ll want a data center that keeps your electronic information accessible at all times. If you’re a property manager, you’ll want to prepare your physical assets for a potential disaster. For instance, steps can be taken to secure your property before a major storm.

Duplication of Power Sources

Investing in emergency generators or talking with data center providers about their back-up procedures should be another priority. You want to make sure duplicate power is available for your critical operations. This means ensuring that equipment or inventory that requires climate-controlled environments are able to access that power in a disaster.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is important to keep critical assets and equipment up and running. However, it’s even more critical in ensuring that your disaster equipment is functional. It’s easy to invest in emergency equipment, extra power, and fire suppression supplies and assume you’re ready for a disaster. However, you should be testing these items on a fixed schedule to make sure they are still in good working order.

Test Runs

Just like school children practice fire drills, you should schedule mock disasters to test your staff, systems, and processes. Simulate a potential disaster such as a hurricane or fire. Then, have your disaster recovery team go through the steps of securing critical equipment and data.

Document issues that arose during the test run and make improvements as needed. Obviously, a test run cannot include all the potential details that may come up in an actual disaster. However, every bit of preparedness will help.