Your server crashes. Ransomware encrypts your files. A pipe bursts and floods your server room. Your cloud provider has an outage. How quickly can you get back to business?

Disaster recovery planning answers that question before disaster strikes.

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of restoring business operations after a major disruption. It’s different from backups—backups are about protecting data; DR is about restoring complete business capability.

A backup means your data exists somewhere safe. Disaster recovery means you can actually use that data to operate your business.

Why small businesses need DR plans

“That won’t happen to us” is how businesses fail. Consider:

  • 23% of small businesses experience at least one disaster annually
  • 40% of businesses never reopen after a major disaster
  • Average downtime cost for small businesses: $8,000-$74,000 per hour
  • Ransomware attacks on small businesses are increasing rapidly

You don’t need an enterprise-scale plan. But you need a plan.

Key DR concepts

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

How long can your business survive without its systems? This is your RTO—the maximum acceptable downtime.

Examples:

  • E-commerce site: Hours (maybe less)
  • Email: Hours to one day
  • Accounting system: Days to a week
  • Historical records: Weeks

Your RTO determines how much you need to invest in recovery capabilities.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

How much data can you afford to lose? If you restore from yesterday’s backup, you lose a day’s work. Is that acceptable?

Examples:

  • Transaction systems: Minutes of data loss maximum
  • Document management: Hours to one day
  • Email: Hours to one day
  • Archives: Days to weeks

Your RPO determines how frequently you need to back up.

Building your DR plan

Step 1: Inventory critical systems

List every system your business depends on. Categorize by criticality:

  • Critical – Business stops without these
  • Important – Significant impact without these
  • Normal – Inconvenient but survivable without these

For each system, document:

  • What it does
  • Where it runs (physical server, cloud, SaaS)
  • Who depends on it
  • How it’s backed up
  • How long you can survive without it

Step 2: Identify risks

What could take your systems down?

  • Hardware failure
  • Software corruption
  • Cyberattack/ransomware
  • Natural disaster (fire, flood, severe weather)
  • Human error
  • Vendor outage
  • Power/internet failure

For each risk, assess likelihood and impact. Focus planning on high-likelihood and high-impact scenarios.

Step 3: Define recovery strategies

For each critical system, define how you’ll recover it:

On-premises servers:

  • Failover to backup hardware?
  • Restore to cloud?
  • Repair and restore?

Cloud services:

  • Vendor’s recovery process?
  • Backup to secondary region?
  • Manual export/import?

SaaS applications:

  • Vendor’s SLA for recovery?
  • Third-party backup?
  • Manual workarounds?

Step 4: Document procedures

Write step-by-step recovery procedures. Include:

  • What triggers the DR process
  • Who makes decisions
  • Contact information (internal and external)
  • Specific technical steps
  • Verification that recovery worked
  • Communication to stakeholders

A procedure you can’t follow under stress is worthless. Keep it clear and practical.

Step 5: Test your plan

Tabletop exercises: Walk through scenarios verbally. “It’s Monday morning and the server won’t boot. What do we do?”

Partial tests: Restore individual systems to verify backups work.

Full tests: Simulate a complete failure and recover from backup. Do this at least annually.

Document what worked and what didn’t. Update your plan based on findings.

Common DR mistakes

Mistake: Untested backups

Many businesses discover their backups don’t work—or don’t include everything needed—only when they try to recover from real disaster. Test regularly.

Mistake: No offsite backup

If your backup is in the same building as your primary systems, one disaster destroys both. Keep at least one backup copy offsite or in the cloud.

Mistake: Forgetting dependencies

Your server backup is useless if you don’t have the network configuration, DNS settings, or credentials needed to make it work. Document everything.

Mistake: No communication plan

During disaster, who needs to know what’s happening? Employees, customers, vendors, partners? Plan communication in advance.

Mistake: Plan sits on a shelf

DR plans expire. Staff changes, systems change, vendors change. Review and update your plan at least annually.

Quick-start DR checklist

If you have nothing today, start with:

  • Identify your 5 most critical systems
  • Verify each has working backups
  • Ensure at least one backup copy is offsite
  • Document basic recovery steps
  • Test restoring one system
  • Write down key contact information

This isn’t a complete DR plan, but it’s infinitely better than nothing.

DR planning help

As a Veeam-certified engineer, I help businesses in Colorado Springs and Denver develop and test disaster recovery plans. Whether you need a complete DR strategy or just want to verify your current approach is sound, let’s talk.

Don’t wait for disaster to find out if you’re prepared.