How to create a data disaster recovery plan in 7 steps

Key Takeaways

• Disaster recovery plans help minimize data loss and downtime after incidents such as natural disasters and cyberattacks.

• Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are key metrics when measuring the success of your disaster recovery plan.

• Using a simple, seven-step framework makes it easier to create an effective recovery plan tailored to your organization’s needs.

• Jira Service Management and Statuspage simplify disaster recovery and help you maintain transparent communication with customers and stakeholders.

Preparing for cyberattacks, hardware failures, and similar incidents can help you minimize the damage these incidents cause. With a data disaster recovery plan, you can stay prepared for any potential disruption.

Your data disaster recovery plan outlines how infrastructure and data will be restored after an incident, a key part of service continuity management. Learn how you can develop a data disaster recovery plan to minimize downtime and quickly and effectively respond to any disruption.

Try Service Collection Free to see how you can use Jira Service Management via Service Collection to establish and implement your disaster recovery plan.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is the set of plans, processes, and technologies an organization uses to restore IT systems, data, and critical operations after a disruptive event, such as a cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural disaster.

The goal is to reduce downtime, limit data loss, and help the organization recover as quickly as possible. While disaster recovery focuses specifically on restoring IT services and infrastructure, business continuity planning looks more broadly at how the business can continue operating during and after a disruption.

How does disaster recovery work?

Creating a disaster recovery plan starts with identifying critical systems, defining recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), selecting recovery strategies, and running predefined playbooks to streamline incident management.

Tools like Jira Service Management (JSM) coordinate incident workflows and recovery tasks to simplify incident management, while Statuspage delivers real-time updates to customers and stakeholders to enhance incident communication.

What threats and failures can disaster recovery help address?

Each type of data disaster has its own set of challenges and impacts. Understanding these types of disasters is the first step in developing an effective recovery plan.

• Natural disasters: Natural events, such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and fires, can physically damage IT infrastructure.

• Cyberattacks: Malicious activities, such as ransomware, phishing, and hacking, compromise data security.

• Hardware failures: Malfunctions or breakdowns of physical components, such as servers, storage devices, and network equipment, can impact business operations.

• Software errors: Software malfunctions, such as bugs, glitches, or failures, can disrupt operations.

• Human errors: Employee mistakes, such as accidental data deletion or misconfiguration, can compromise data integrity.

How to build a disaster recovery plan in 7 steps

Building a disaster recovery plan is a key part of continuous improvement. Using this seven-step framework will help you move from documentation to operational readiness. Each step should be documented, tested, and integrated into IT service management (ITSM) workflows using tools like JSM.

Step 1: Define what “disaster” means and who declares it

The first thing you need to do is establish clear criteria for what qualifies as a disaster versus a major incident that requires major incident management. Create a simple disaster-declaration decision tree tied to RTO/RPO thresholds to make this easier.

Quickly identifying disasters and running your predefined playbook helps minimize the damage they cause, so having clear criteria for disaster identification is essential.

Step 2: Conduct a risk assessment to identify threats

The next step is conducting a risk assessment to identify potential threats. When you’re identifying potential threats, consider threats across infrastructure, applications, vendors, and security risks.

Threats should be scored based on likelihood and impact; that way you can easily determine which are the highest-priority threats. High-impact, high-likelihood threats pose a more significant risk to your organization, so they should be prioritized above low-impact or low-likelihood threats.

Step 3: Run a business impact analysis to determine what must be restored first

Once you’ve established a clear process for defining a disaster and identified potential threats to your organization, you can run a business impact analysis to figure out what needs to be restored first to minimize the impact of a disaster.

Identify critical business functions and map them to supporting systems within your organization, then define RTO and RPO for each system using a standardized template table. This provides a benchmark you can use to measure the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan.

Create tiers and place systems into tiers based on priority. For example, tier 1 should include mission-critical systems while the systems in tier 2 aren’t quite as impactful. This helps you guide recovery sequencing and resource allocation to ensure the most important systems and data are restored as quickly as possible. You can use an RTO/RPO template table to streamline this process.

Step 4: Select a recovery strategy for your situation

This is the step where you start to formulate your recovery strategy based on your situation. For your recovery strategy, you’ll need to choose between:

• Backup & restore: This strategy creates copies of data at specific points in time, giving you access to long-term business records and historical data. Backups are a relatively cost-effective way to prevent data loss and can help you maintain compliance.

• Replication: Replication copies and moves data between sites, which can be synchronous, asynchronous, or near-synchronous. While replication can help minimize RTO and maximize availability, it’s also a more expensive recovery strategy.

You’ll also need to choose between hot, warm, or cold sites:

• Hot: Hot sites are a fully functional replica, which results in the fastest recovery times but also costs the most because the infrastructure has to be fully replicated.

• Warm: Warm sites are pre-configured sites that require some manual work, such as installing software. These sites offer a balance between cost-effectiveness and recovery time at the cost of some manual effort.

• Cold: Cold sites are the most cost-effective option because they require minimal maintenance over time. However, cold sites also have the longest recovery times because they require the most configuration to get up and running.

Step 5: Document recovery runbooks and store them in a centralized location

When an incident occurs, your runbooks play a key role in streamlining disaster recovery and minimizing downtime. Create clear, step-by-step runbooks for each critical system, and include activation steps, failover procedures, validation checks, and ownership.

You can store and manage these runbooks in a centralized workspace, and runbooks can be linked directly to JSM incidents and change workflows for faster access during recovery.

Step 6: Establish communication workflows to align teams

Communication is crucial throughout the disaster recovery process, so it’s smart to establish clear communication workflows. Define internal and external communication triggers, stakeholder update cadences, and regulatory notification requirements to keep key members of the organization in the loop.

Use JSM to manage internal coordination and task visibility across teams, and use Statuspage to publish real-time customer-facing updates during active incidents to keep customers and stakeholders aware.

Step 7: Test, measure, and improve to inform future recovery plans

Reviewing disaster recovery plan examples can help you develop your own plan, but regular testing is the best way to ensure your plan is effective. Schedule quarterly tabletop exercises, biannual partial failover tests, and annual full simulations to make sure your strategy is effective in action. You should also schedule an immediate retest after major infrastructure changes.

Track key metrics such as actual recovery time vs. RTO, actual data loss vs. RPO, and mean time to recover (MTTR). Conduct post-incident reviews to continuously improve runbooks and workflows.

Data disaster recovery strategies to consider

Businesses can employ various data disaster recovery strategies to ensure business continuity, such as:

• Backup and restore: Regularly back up data for data disaster recovery and restore it when needed.

• Cloud-based disaster recovery: Use cloud services for scalable and flexible recovery options.

• DevOps practices: Integrate disaster recovery into the DevOps pipeline to automate and streamline recovery.

• High availability solutions: Implement systems that ensure continuous operation even during failures.

• Incident response: In a well-defined incident response plan, outline the steps for detecting, analyzing, containing, and recovering from cybersecurity incidents.

• Redundancy: Implement redundant systems and components to prevent single points of failure.

• Replication: Duplicate data and systems to a secondary location for quick recovery.

• Virtualization: Use virtual machines to quickly restore IT services.

Finally, incorporating IT service management (ITSM) practices into your disaster recovery strategies can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your recovery efforts. ITSM software can manage and streamline disaster recovery processes, ensuring smooth and comprehensive recovery.

Turn your disaster recovery plan into operational readiness

Creating a disaster recovery plan is only one step. Once you have a disaster recovery plan in place, operationalize your plan by embedding it into daily workflows, automating escalations, and aligning recovery metrics like RTO and RPO with service-level goals.

Jira Service Management simplifies structured incident response and recovery coordination, and Statuspage makes it easy to maintain transparent communication with customers and stakeholders. You can even use the Jira Service Management templates collection to simplify and unify your disaster recovery plan.

Join a Jira live demo and Q&A to learn more about how Jira can help you create an effective disaster recovery plan.