Will Your Disaster Recovery Plan Work?

It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday, and your team can’t get into the system they use to process orders. Your IT provider confirms that last night’s backup completed. That’s good news, but the warehouse still needs to know what to ship, customer service needs to answer calls, and your leadership team needs to know when work can resume.

A successful backup gives you a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the work of getting that data, the systems that use it, and the people who depend on it back up and running. The difference becomes clear when you try to complete a real business task after a restore.

Follow the Work, From Sign-In to Shipment

Say your order database is restored by noon. Can warehouse employees sign in? Can they see the orders that came in before the outage? Can they print shipping labels and send tracking numbers to customers? A restored database is one step in a process that may also depend on employee accounts, a working network, application settings, and connections to outside services.

Start your recovery plan with the work your business needs to resume first. Ask each department which tasks can wait and which would create immediate problems if they stopped. Then map what each critical task depends on. That exercise helps you set a recovery order. For example, restoring the system that handles employee sign-ins may need to happen before anyone can use the order application.

Decide How Much Downtime and Data Loss You Can Absorb

Two numbers help turn “get us back up as soon as possible” into a plan your IT team can build and test:

• Recovery time objective (RTO). How soon does a system or process need to be usable again? If orders must start moving within four hours to make the afternoon pickup, use that deadline to guide your recovery target.
• Recovery point objective (RPO). How much recent work can you afford to lose or recreate? If you can tolerate losing at most one hour of order activity, your recovery process needs to bring you back to a usable copy from within that window.

Set these targets with the people who understand the business impact. An overnight backup may be adequate for an archive that changes infrequently. For a system receiving orders all day, restoring yesterday’s copy could leave employees piecing together hours of transactions. Decide where that extra work is manageable and where it would put customer commitments at risk.

Make Sure You Can Reach a Usable Backup During an Incident

Think through how your team would access backups if the office were unavailable or an administrator account were compromised. Who can sign in? Where are the recovery instructions and credentials kept? Can the people responsible for recovery reach them if company email or the shared drive is down?

This matters especially during a ransomware incident, when attackers may try to delete or encrypt backups they can reach. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommends maintaining offline, encrypted backups and testing them regularly. Your recovery plan should identify who can access a protected copy and how the team will choose a restore point that predates the compromise.

Test Whether Employees Can Actually Resume Work

Restoring a sample file is a useful first check. For a more meaningful test, choose one essential workflow and practice recovering it in a separate environment. Have the IT team restore the necessary systems and ask the people who use them to complete a representative task. That could mean entering a test order, generating an invoice, or checking that the right employees can access a shared application.

Time the exercise from the point the outage is declared to the point employees confirm they can work. Record how recent the restored data was and where the team lost time. Maybe a vendor login was tied to someone who left, or an integration needed a setting that nobody had documented. Assign someone to fix each gap, update the instructions, and retest after significant changes.

Put Your Recovery Plan to Work With ZTek Solutions

Start with the one process you’d need back first if your systems went down tomorrow. Ask who would lead the recovery, what needs to be restored in what order, and when your team last proved it could complete that work using recovered systems.

If the answers are unclear, that’s a practical place to begin. Talk with ZTek Solutions about your backups, recovery priorities, and how to test whether your business can get back to work when it matters.

ZTek Solutions is a Managed Service Provider based out of Miami Lakes, FL has over 60 years of combined experience in designing, implementing, securing, and managing IT Infrastructure at all levels. Solutions include Managed IT, Cybersecurity, IT Consulting, Cloud Services, Structured Cabling, Video Surveillance, Telecommunications, and Compliance.