Nearly three out of four organizations are at risk of failing to recover from a disaster or outage. Two thirds say their disaster recover (DR) planning did not prove useful in their worst event. Most have not documented their DR plans, have not established key metrics such as Recovery Time Objectives, Recovery Point Objectives, failover, or failback processes. Those are the disconcerting results of a survey conducted by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council. 

You know how important your systems are to your operation so if you fall into one of those categories, it’s time to do something about it. Here is a five-step plan to get you started on developing an effective DR plan.

1. Inventory your applications and services
As a first step, you need to understand what applications and services you are going to protect under your DR plan. Begin with mission critical apps that control your financial and business processes and then move on to others that are necessary to keep your ongoing business operations up and running. After identifying these critical elements, assign priority levels to each.