Reviewed and updated 20 October 2026.
A power outage, cyber incident, equipment failure or loss of access can disrupt your organisation – and if that happens, you’ll need to have a disaster recovery plan in place to guide how essential services will be restored and disruption managed. So how does a comprehensive disaster recovery plan actually keep your data protected, and how can you ensure your strategy incorporates tools to make sure you’re prepared for the worst?
Enabling a thorough Back Up: Restoring your data
It’s fair to say that quality back up and disaster recovery programs go hand in hand. Backup provides recovery copies of data. Disaster recovery sets out how the business restores services, including applications, access, dependencies and responsibilities. Safeguarding your data with a thorough back up program that includes both onsite and offsite storage is more than just an insurance policy – it gives you the tools you need to get your business back up and running as quickly as possible. Set the recovery point objective (RPO), or acceptable recent data loss, and recovery time objective (RTO), or target time to restore a service. Use restore tests to check whether the design meets those targets.
Practice makes perfect: Ironing out vulnerabilities
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when it comes to disaster recovery is assuming that once their strategy is in place, it can be left alone until it is needed. Instead of leaving your strategy to gather dust, the strongest disaster recovery plans incorporate measures to make sure the whole team involved understands the capabilities of their strategies. It can be easy to push disaster recovery to the back of your mind, but disaster can strike at any time, with no warning. This means it’s important that testing the efficiency of your disaster recovery in real terms becomes a habitual aspect of your wider security strategy. Holding test runs, as if your data has been lost to a cyber attack, is a great way of shedding light on any vulnerabilities that have been missed in your systems. Identifying any changes that need making to your systems will give you the ability to incorporate fixing weakness into your disaster recovery strategy. Record test scope, timings, results and corrective actions. A successful test provides evidence for that scenario; it cannot guarantee that a future incident will have no unexpected complications.
Going with the flow: Prepare to evolve
As with any segment of your IT strategy, leaving space to evolve will allow your disaster recovery plan to grow as the threats against your systems change and develop. It’s impossible to know when a natural disaster or cyber attack could hit, but by staying aware of trends and threats within the digital world, you can make sure your business isn’t left in the dark by an unexpected catastrophe. One example of this is the importance now placed on data security within back up and disaster recovery strategies. In a post-GDPR world, protecting your clients’ data is paramount to your business continuity even when you’re in the middle of an emergency. Data encryption tools and software are now built into disaster recovery programs to make sure that your data security is affected as little as possible: review hosting, access controls, retention, backup isolation and recovery responsibilities against your actual requirements.
Keeping your business moving forward: Knowing how to get back on track
A recovery plan should be based on the impact of losing each business service, rather than an unverified failure statistic. Identify which tasks must resume first and who can authorise recovery. One of the most attractive benefits of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is the reduced downtime it enables your business to have. This means that your business’s infrastructure can be restored as quickly as possible, with minimum time spent restoring your data. This is crucial for reassuring your clients that you have the situation under control, retaining your customer database, and ultimately safeguarding your reputation. By making reduced downtime a priority within your disaster recovery strategy, you can focus on moving your business forward, rather than struggling with the consequences of a disaster.
Don’t let the failure to prepare affect your business’s ability to bounce back. Review your plan after changes to systems, suppliers or key people. CIS can help you define backup coverage, recovery priorities and a practical restore-testing schedule. Discuss your backup and disaster recovery requirements with CIS.
