How To Create A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Small Business?

Between 40 and 60% of small businesses won’t survive a disaster.

Yet, 46% of companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan.

Unfortunately, as a business owner, you’re facing daily business risks, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, and even critical staff resignations.

And if you’re not prepared adequately, your business could suffer greatly and even have to close its doors.

The good news is that creating an effective disaster recovery plan to pop into your business plan can help ensure your business continuity and minimise the loss incurred by the disaster.

And in this article, we share five easy steps to create a disaster recovery plan that will help you quickly recover from a disaster.

Creating A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your Business

Assign Clear Roles And Responsibilities

Each employee should be assigned responsibility in the event of a disaster. It could be something as small as reporting a cybersecurity threat to the relevant person. In addition to clearly assigning responsibilities to your employees, you should also create a dedicated disaster recovery team trained to deal with specific disasters. For instance, your IT and admin team might be the best people to rely on if you’re under cyberattack. However, in the event of the unexpected resignation of a key employee, your HR team might be best to handle the situation.

Once your disaster recovery team knows exactly what to do if something happens, share the contact information and responsibilities of each of them with the broader team.

You should also conduct regular training to ensure your personnel is up to date with emergency protocols and procedures. Learning how to effectively delegate to your employees will make it easier to assign clear roles and responsibilities as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Identify The Risk Areas

With each disaster, identify the potential risks to your business. This will allow you to build effective mitigation strategies.

Here’s a list of some of the disasters to consider in your disaster recovery plan:

• Natural disasters such as flooding, fires, storms impacting your infrastructure, or a pandemic.
• Physical disasters such as loss of power, general infrastructure failure, and break-ins.
• Technology-based disasters such as ransomware attacks or data breaches.

If one of these scenarios occurs, the questions you should ask include how will your physical assets, your workflow, and communications be impacted?

Conduct A Business Impact Assessment

A business impact assessment (BIA) allows you to map out all areas of your business activities and determine how critical they are to your company. The idea behind a BIA is to identify key resources essential to the business’s continued operation.

Carrying out a BIA is the best way to predict a major disruption’s financial and operational impact on your business functions and gather the information you need to establish effective recovery strategies.

As a general rule of thumb, your disaster recovery plan should focus on income-generating activities and payroll, although your goal should be to resume your full operation as quickly as possible.

Audit Your Assets And Create Backups

One of the most vital steps of your disaster recovery plan is to audit your most impactful assets, such as hardware, physical inventory, or sensitive documents.

And once you’ve identified your most critical assets, perform back-ups.

Whether a fire occurs in your office or you’re the victim of a cyberattack, having backups of key documents is a fail-safe.

That’s why your recovery plan should include strategic information such as:

• Who is in charge of the backups?
• How often should backups be performed?
• What information needs to be backed up?
• How to recover information from backups?

Purchase Business Insurance

Even with the best disaster recovery plan in place, your business could still face tremendous financial loss in a disaster. So, to alleviate the stress of the negative impact of a disaster on your company, make sure to buy business insurance, including cyber & liability insurance. This will protect your company and your financial assets if a disaster occurs and help you ensure business continuity during these challenging times.

To find the best policy for your business, jump onto our instant quote generator, where you can get an estimate on market-leading insurance in seconds. 

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