Disasters often occur unexpectedly, but businesses can still plan their recovery in advance. In Hawai’i, businesses should be ready for weather-related power outages, tourist-related property damage, cyberattacks, hardware failures, and much more.
Regardless of the type of disaster, recovery relies on preparation. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a strategic safety net to make sure the business can bounce back and minimize losses in the event of disaster. This includes finding the right risk and insurance consultants for their needs.
This article aims to help businesses in Hawai’i build a flexible disaster recovery plan, one that predicts liabilities and addresses the coverage gaps of a business before an unwelcome event turns into a costly closure. Today, industries move quickly. Competitive businesses should prepare to recover just as much as they prepare to succeed.
What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
The goal of a disaster recovery plan is to restore essential systems and operations after an unforeseen event. Often confused with business continuity plans (BCP) which plan for a business to continue operating during an unexpected event; a DRP is the plan for what businesses should do after the event has happened.
The DRP should be designed to minimize downtime and recover what was lost, including data systems, IT infrastructure, communications, and production time.
A disaster recovery plan has four core components: risk and impact assessments, recovery objectives, response procedures, and testing.
What are the 4 C’s of disaster recovery?
To execute these four components, businesses can structure their DRP around these 4 pillars or “C’s” of disaster recovery planning:
- Communication: accurate and real-time information reaches all relevant contributors
- Coordination: requires aligning internal and external teams, contacting emergency services, and alerting insurers, software vendors, and other relevant parties about the situation
- Continuity: keeping business-critical functions operating during and after the unforeseen event
- Collaboration: structures teamwork between departments to support a coordinated recovery effort
The 4 C’s are broad abstracts for businesses to follow when making a disaster recovery plan, but they provide essential guidance when setting priorities before, during, and after a disaster.
Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Disaster Recovery Plan
For a more detailed breakdown of how businesses in Hawai’i should structure their disaster recovery plans, here are the seven steps that managers and coordinators should adapt for their situation:
1. Conduct a Risk and Impact Assessment
Planning for disaster requires first identifying the natural and man-made threats that can impact the business and ordering them by likelihood and potential impact. The assessment should include an evaluation of the sectors most vulnerable to certain types of disruption.
For example, businesses should assess their data centers and communication systems for vulnerabilities related to server outages, both weather-related and hardware-related. Risk matrices and business impact analyses may be useful in guiding the impact assessment. Risk and insurance consultants will want to review the results to customize a recovery plan for the distinct risks of the business.
2. Prioritize Business-Critical Systems and Functions
A DRP should prioritize business-critical processes by identifying the most essential ones and mapping system interdependencies. For example, if a server goes down, businesses should identify which employees, vendors, or systems will be impacted by the loss of that data. For most modern businesses, systems rely on each other like a house of cards. A disaster recovery plan should be structured to rebuild the house using the strongest possible foundation.
3. Set Recovery Objectives
Two types of recovery objectives exist: recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Both are essential for businesses to define while creating their DRP. The RTO is the time needed to resume essential operations.
The RPO is the amount of data loss that the business can tolerate without losing critical functions: this can be an hour or a day. These factors rely on identifying business-critical systems and gauging their importance to overall operations.
4. Establish Roles and Responsibilities
A well-structured DRP establishes roles and responsibilities during and after a disaster, including leadership assignments, communication liaisons, technical responders, and legal contacts. These roles need to be assigned and tracked, along with an emergency contact list and escalation procedures so that both internal and external teams are kept in the loop.
5. Develop Backup and Recovery Procedures
For modern businesses, data servers are business-critical functions. Businesses should choose appropriate data backup methods as part of their recovery plan, including combining cloud, offsite storage, and hybrid servers. The plan should include instructions for system restoration, data access, and role verification to minimize disruptions.
6. Create a Communication Plan
Businesses should outline how employees, customers, vendors, partners, contributors, and media will be contacted during and after the disaster. As part of the recovery plan, businesses can draft message templates for potential scenarios and plan for potential communication system failures based on their infrastructure.
7. Train Teams and Test the Plan
Successful disaster recovery relies on well-trained staff and detailed testing. Businesses should schedule regular simulations, tabletop drills, and post-mortem incident analyses. With the right review cycle, companies can test major changes or review their recovery plans annually to identify and respond to blind spots.
What is the Disaster Recovery 3-2-1 Rule?
The 3-2-1 rule refers to how businesses should protect data. In today’s data-driven industries, cyberattacks or hardware failures are potentially devastating disasters that impact employee safety, consumer trust, and financial security. The 3-2-1 rule refers to three copies of data being created and stored on two different types of storage media, such as a cloud server and a hard disk copy. The last copy, the “one,” should be stored offsite in case multiple systems are compromised.
Partner with Experienced Local Insurance Guides to Create Disaster Recovery Plans for Your Business
Risk and insurance consultants know better than anyone that being unprepared for a disaster is often more damaging than the disaster itself. When a business experiences disaster due to weather, theft, cyberattacks, or any number of unforeseen events, it should have a thorough plan in place to recover quickly and minimize loss.
At Atlas Insurance, our team of local advisors recognizes the liabilities facing businesses in Hawai’i. We help managers form and update disaster recovery plans to help them restore essential systems, data, and production processes after a disruptive event. Contact our team today to learn how to put a plan in action that will protect your valuable data and your bottom line during and after a disaster.