A practical checklist for disaster recovery

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Run through this the next time disaster recovery comes up.

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The checklist

• Ask how long you could be down before it really hurts
• That answer sets your budget
• Practise the recovery at least once a year
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why this earns attention

Ask how long you could be down before it really hurts. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Three things worth confirming about disaster recovery before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• That answer sets your budget — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.