IT Disaster Recovery

IT Disaster Recovery Master Guide

At a time when companies depend on IT and data for everything, having an IT disaster recovery plan couldn’t be more important. These plans help companies get their technology back online as quickly, completely, and affordably as possible after an outage. They make a bad situation better—but going without one makes it worse.

Business continuity and compliance are too important to put at risk, yet all it takes it one IT disaster to jeopardize both. Disaster could come in the form of a cyber attack, data breach, severe weather, building fire, or accidental error. IT is sensitive by nature, and keeping it safe from every threat, in any form, all the time, is more than any company, even the world’s largest, can guarantee. That’s why it’s so important to be ready and to never assume that IT is immune.

The first and most important step is developing an IT disaster recovery plan. This Master Guide draws on the experience and expertise of the ISOutsource team to explain everything there is to know.

In This Guide

• What is in an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?
• What’s included in an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?
• Common Threats to IT Systems
• Testing and Updating Your Plan
• Feeling Confident about Disaster Recovery
• Contact Us Today

What is Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is the process of restoring IT and data to full strength and normal working order following a devastating incident like a ransomware attack or hurricane. Broken technology only prolongs the disaster and increases the damages, so getting it back up and running needs to happen as quickly as possible. Everything that entails, from diagnosing the full extent of the problem(s) to fixing each and every issue, falls under the heading of disaster recovery. It’s about going from a crisis back to the status quo.

What’s in an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

An IT disaster recovery plan tells a security or IT team exactly what to do after an incident occurs to neutralize the threat, minimize the damage and data loss, and get back to normal. For example, when a recent Crowdstrike update caused widespread outages on Windows computers, disaster recovery got the affected computers back to work.

IT incidents can happen at any time and affect IT in unpredictable ways. Needing to act quickly and work effectively in the face of uncertainty creates a high-pressure situation. Communication and coordination break down and get replaced by confusion and chaos, with the result that incidents last longer, spread farther, and disrupt or destroy more.

IT disaster recovery plans keep this from happening by giving responders a detailed playbook with specific instructions to follow about, for instance, when and how to restore data backups. These plans take effect as soon as an incident occurs, and they apply to any scenario no matter what attack, exposure, or asset is involved, so that disaster recovery always proceeds as planned according to all best practices. Every company needs one, without exception.

What’s included in an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

IT disasters come in many different shapes and sizes, and IT backup and disaster recovery plans do too, to some extent. It’s important to align the plan with the company’s IT, strategy, and risk exposures. However, it’s just as important to include the key components of an IT disaster recovery plan so that gaps and deficiencies don’t compromise the disaster recovery effort when it matters most. All plans should include:

1. Specific Goals: Disaster recovery is measured by two metrics. The recovery time objective (RTO) indicates how long it takes to recover, and the recovery point objective (RPO) indicates how old the recovered files can be. Plans should include specific but realistic goals for both metrics to benchmark the effectiveness of each disaster recovery effort.
2. Asset Tracking – In order to address all the technology a disaster could potentially affect, take an inventory of all the company’s hardware and software, then rank each entry by importance. These rankings help disaster recovery teams plan their efforts to expedite recovery and reduce business impact.
3. Personnel Roles – Clearly define each person’s role on the disaster recovery team and what their responsibilities are at every point. Also include hierarchies, contingency planning, and whatever else it takes to ensure that each person knows exactly what they should be doing at any given time.
4. Site Selection – Companies may be required to operate from alternate locations until the restoration process is complete, so plans should dictate where those sites are, on what conditions they should be used, and what form of disaster assistance each performs so that sites can be activated as soon as possible following an incident.
5. Response Procedures: Often the largest part of an IT disaster recovery plan is the steps the team will follow to systematically address the issue at hand. Those procedures will guide the team through a process of diagnosing the problem, stopping the incident, containing the damage, and restoring apps and data—followed by a separate process to prevent a repeat incident by improving resilience.
6. Data Catalog: Another way to prevent delays and mistakes is to include a catalog of all the data in the organization, including its location and whether it contains personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive information.
7. Communication Plan: Create a plan to keep information flowing between internal stakeholders as well as vendors, business partners, and disaster assistance providers. It should include contact information, instructions for who to contact and when, plus guidance for how to communicate with customers, clients, and/or the media and law enforcement.
8. Improvement Schedule: Make sure that IT disaster recovery plans are evolving with the IT infrastructure and threat landscape by working an improvement schedule into the plan itself. Dictate when the review will happen, who will be involved, what will be considered, and how progress will be measured.

Common Threats to IT Systems

Cyber attacks aren’t the only cause of IT disasters, but considering that attacks doubled between 2020 and 2024, this threat can’t be ignored. Threats to IT system take many forms, and attackers are constantly searching for new ways to bypass data protection measures and reach sensitive assets. What all these threats have in common, however, is the need to put an IT disaster recovery plan into effect when one of them occurs:

Malware

Any program designed with malicious intent, from ransomware that encrypts files to spyware that snoops on users, falls under the definition of malware. It can compromise IT in countless different ways, making malware an important consideration when exploring how to ensure disaster recovery and provide disaster assistance.

Spoofing

When an attacker pretends to be another person to trick a user into supplying data or access, it’s called spoofing. Since these attacks rely on insiders and their privileges, they can be extremely destructive and difficult to reverse.

Phishing

Email, texts, social media and more can all be exploited by attackers to carry out phishing attacks, which disguise themselves as something known and trustworthy to get people to drop their guard. Phishing attacks have been a problem for decades, so they must also be a major focus of disaster recovery planning.

Identity Attacks

Identity attacks involve a bad actor either buying, stealing, or guessing a user’s login credentials and using them to access IT systems without raising alarm bells. Misappropriated identities are a persistent problem since people often reuse passwords or forego multi-factor authentication.

Code Injection

Forcing malicious code into a computer or network can turn a normal piece of IT into a cyber weapon that causes deep and unpredictable damage. Code injection attacks are becoming more common as IT system have more overlapping and interdependent functions.

Social Engineering

Attackers use sophisticated psychological techniques and targeted campaigns to convince users to unwittingly enable cyber attacks. Several of the biggest, most expensive disaster recovery efforts in recent years were caused by social engineering attacks.

Supply Chain Attacks

Hackers bypass security controls and detection tools by hiding attacks insider of software or services provided by a third-party. The difficult nature of detecting these attacks, remediating them early, and dealing with complex IT interdependencies makes planning for these attacks a must.

Insider Threats

Employees, contractors, and business partners who have access to a company’s IT system can accidentally or intentionally cause IT disasters of all kinds. Like other entire on this list, any attacks that gets “inside” the defensive perimeter, especially without attracting attention, will require a robust disaster recovery response.

DNS Tunneling

Simple to deploy and with widespread negative effects, DNS tunneling attacks give attackers a way to hide from security controls while stealing enough access to extract data or inject malware. These attacks have been increasing since many novice and basic hackers prefer them.

IoS Attacks

Internet of things (IoT) devices often lack adequate security controls, and attacks can commandeer these devices to steal data, disrupt operations, or create botnets. IoT attacks need to be a bigger focus of disaster recovery planning as these devices continue to proliferate.

Denial of Service Attacks

When attackers flood a network with requests in order to overwhelm it and make access impossible to others. Denial of service attacks (typically) don’t result in data loss, but they throw business operations into chaos and require a specific remediation strategy from the disaster recovery team.

AI Attacks

More attacks now use artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase the scale or sophistication of their methods, including nearly all the attacks listed above. AI poses a significant risk to cybersecurity, yet many disaster recovery plans overlook or underestimate the consequences.

Testing and Updating Your Plan

The IT infrastructure and cyber attack landscape change all the time, at a faster pace than ever. If the IT disaster recovery plan doesn’t do the same, it could become irrelevant or unhelpful in ways that make the attack even worse.

Creating an IT disaster recovery plan in the first place starts by conducting a risk assessment and business impact analysis to understand how, in as much detail as possible, various attack scenarios would affect resilience, revenue, or relationships. Repeat the same process at least once a year (ideally more) to account for new attacks and IT, then address any new or increasing risks.

Mature organizations make continuous improvement a part of the disaster recovery plan and risk management effort by specifying when testing will happen and how updates will get incorporated. Better yet, they have outside assistance to ensure the process is objective and thorough without becoming a distraction from the in-house team.

Conclusion – Feeling Confident about Disaster Recovery

Two obstacles stand in the way of feeling certain that disaster recovery can immediately leap into action and fully restore business continuity. First, creating a plan with the necessary depth and detail to be useful in any disaster. Second, building a unit with the skills, talent, and tools to carry out a disaster recovery plan even when they are surrounded by chaos. Both sides can be a struggle, yet without excelling on each end, disaster recovery can prove to be a disastrous disappointment.

Keep that from happening with the help of ISOutsource. Our managed cybersecurity services are here to help companies implement robust plans, review and improve them regularly, and provide any (of all) the support necessary to overcome complex cyber attacks. Disaster recovery takes many things—we offer all of them.

Make your final line of defense a formidable one. Contact ISOutsource to start feeling confident about disaster recovery.