Practical Disaster Recovery Policy

When you hear SOC 2 compliance you take a deep breath and you feel like it’s yet another utterly useless stuff for your company needs to adhere. But here me out, I will show you the practical aspect which will help you to scale your business and improve your overall security. Let’s see a pretty useful aspec, the Disaster Recovery Plan.

Disaster recovery (DRP) is all about business impact (financial and reputation) and regulations. If you don’t have any customers you don’t need a DRP, nothing happens if your service is down, would not impact anyone…

I will explain here a practical DRP approach for SMBs.

Key Elements of Your Disaster Recovery Plan

1) Define RTO and RPO for Each Service:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Maximum acceptable downtime for each service.

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Maximum acceptable data loss time frame.

2) Step-by-Step Recovery Plan:

• Outline specific steps to recover each service based on the type of disaster (e.g., cyberattack, hardware failure, natural disaster).

3) Emergency Contacts:

• Team Leads: List of employees responsible for each critical service, with their roles and contact information.

• Point of Contact: One person in charge of coordinating the recovery and troubleshooting any issues with the disaster recovery plan.

• Vendors and Third Parties: Contact details for software vendors, third-party services, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) providers, including steps to activate their services.

4) Access and Security Information:

• Passwords and Access Keys: Securely store critical passwords, access rights, and configuration details required for recovery.

• Authorization List: Names and roles of team members who have the necessary permissions to access systems and data during recovery.

5) Facilities and Emergency Response:

• Property Management: Contact information for facility owners and property managers.

• Emergency Responders: Key contacts such as local fire, police, and medical responders.

6) IT Infrastructure Details:

• IT Setup Overview: If you use a physical data center, include a simple diagram of your IT infrastructure, showing where key servers and recovery sites are located.

• Virtualization Details: If your business relies on virtual machines (VMs), outline where they are stored and the basic steps for recovering them.

Quick Steps for Disaster Recovery

• Step 1: Assess the Situation – Identify the disaster type and impacted services.

• Step 2: Notify the Team – Contact key personnel and stakeholders.

• Step 3: Activate the Plan – Follow the playbook for recovery actions.

• Step 4: Communicate Status – Keep internal and external stakeholders updated.

• Step 5: Verify Recovery – Test to ensure all services are fully restored.

• Step 6: Post-Recovery Review – Document what worked, what didn’t, and update the playbook

That’s it, now you now all the important parts about DR.

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If you want to learn more, check my entire article about here: https://www.soc-2-compliance.com/hub/practical-disaster-recovery-plan-template-drp