Anyone on an organization’s IT team knows that unexpected accidents, emergencies, or disasters can strike when least expected. These events often result in the loss of critical data—one of the most valuable assets a business owns. That’s why data protection and recovery are essential components of any comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
Data recovery is the process of restoring data that has been lost, corrupted, or rendered inaccessible back to its original location within a network. This could include a computer, mobile device, storage system, or server. Successful recovery ensures business continuity and minimizes downtime when the unexpected happens.
Why Is Data Recovery Necessary?
While data is one of the most valuable assets for any organization, it’s also increasingly complex to manage and often highly sensitive. When that data is lost or falls into the wrong hands, the consequences can be severe and costly for both the organization and the individuals affected.
Consider this example: if a financial institution like a bank loses access to customers’ sensitive financial information, the fallout could be significant. The bank might face hefty compliance fines, while customers could be exposed to fraud or identity theft.
Recovering stolen, lost, or compromised data quickly is critical to minimizing damage and restoring trust. A strong data recovery strategy is a business imperative.
5 Essential Steps in Your Disaster Recovery Plan
#1: Create a layered security plan to prevent a disaster
In general, data recovery and a disaster recovery plan are utilized for unforeseen emergencies. Ideally, data loss of any kind should be a rare occurrence. Creating a layered data security plan can stop preventable data loss before it happens. To minimize potential damage, organizations should make a detailed disaster recovery plan a top priority.
#2: Identify the biggest threat to your data
The cyber threat landscape is constantly growing and evolving, meaning organizations need to stay up to date on the latest threats. Threat research, intelligence, and mitigation solutions can help to prevent unwanted data leaks, reduce noise and false positives, and help organizations mitigate data loss if they do occur.
On the other end of the threat spectrum, though, organizations should also prepare for other types of unintentional disasters like power outages, natural disasters, building fires, and more that aren’t necessarily preventable. Regardless of whether data loss is caused by a bad actor with malicious intentions, like a targeted attack, or an event outside of anybody’s control, like a natural disaster, organizations need to concentrate on identifying the biggest threats to their data and quantifying the risk of each threat.
#3: Identify your mission-critical data
Not all data is created equal, which is why understanding your organization’s data is critical to building an effective recovery plan. The first step is identifying and prioritizing mission-critical data—the information your business cannot operate without.
Data classification solutions can help pinpoint the most sensitive and high-value data, while data loss prevention (DLP) tools provide visibility into where that data resides and how it’s being accessed or shared. Together, these solutions form the foundation for a smarter, more resilient data protection strategy.
#4: Define your recovery objectives and goals
Identifying your organization’s crown jewels and in turn, organizing the rest of your data by its importance can allow you to calculate your recovery point objectives (RPO). RPOs are essentially the maximum amount of data your organization can afford to lose in the wake of a disaster, along with your recovery time objectives (RTO), which is the maximum amount of system downtime your organization can afford. In other words, by organizing and prioritizing your data by its impact on business operations, you can better understand how often data backups should take place and how long it should take to restore operations.
#5: Draft, test, & update your disaster recovery plan
An organization’s data is only one component of its IT systems. In reality, functioning systems also require working hardware, properly running software applications, internet connectivity, and the proper environmental conditions for hardware to run.
The scope of a disaster recovery plan should go far beyond the recovery of data alone. The best disaster recovery plans are regularly re-drafted, amended, and tested by recovery teams. Similar to an organization’s data policies and security solutions, a disaster recovery plan should be flexible enough to evolve with your organization.
Ultimately, a detailed, comprehensive disaster recovery plan ensures your organization is prepared to respond quickly and effectively to any attack, disaster, or data breach, helping you restore normal operations with minimal disruption. Just as importantly, it provides a critical layer of protection for sensitive data, safeguarding it against even the most severe threats.
