IT Disaster Recovery: A Simple Plan for Small Businesses
If your systems went down tomorrow — fire, theft, flood, hardware failure or a cyber attack — what would you do? A disaster recovery (DR) plan answers that question in advance, so a bad day doesn't become a closed business. It doesn't need to be complicated; it needs to be written down, realistic and tested.
Know what you'd need to get back
Start by listing the systems and data the business genuinely can't run without — email, accounts, customer records, line-of-business apps — and how quickly each needs to be back. Two simple numbers guide everything else:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) — how long you can afford to be without a system before it really hurts.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — how much data you could afford to lose, measured in time (an hour? a day?). This sets how often you must back up.
Not everything needs the same level of protection, and knowing the priorities stops you over-spending on the trivial and under-protecting the critical.
The building blocks
- Tested backups following the 3-2-1 rule — the foundation of any recovery, with at least one copy off-site or in the cloud and one kept offline so ransomware can't reach it.
- Clear recovery steps written down in plain language, so anyone can follow them under pressure — not just the one person who set things up.
- Key contacts and logins (IT support, broadband and phone providers, insurers, software vendors) stored securely but accessibly, including a copy that doesn't depend on the systems that are down.
- A communication plan for staff and customers during an outage, so people aren't left guessing.
Common threats to plan for
A good plan covers the realistic risks, not just dramatic ones: a failed server or drive, accidental deletion, a ransomware attack, a lost or stolen laptop, a broadband outage, and physical events like fire or flood at your premises. Cloud services help with some of these, but "it's in the cloud" is not a backup on its own — you still need your own copy.
Test it before you need it
A plan you've never rehearsed is a guess. Periodically perform a real test restore and walk through the steps end to end — it's the only way to discover that a backup was silently failing, or that a vital step was missing, while it's safe to find out rather than mid-crisis. Review the plan whenever your systems or staff change.
We'll help you prepare
Our managed IT services and cyber security teams build and maintain backups and a practical, tested recovery plan sized to your business — so you're ready for whatever comes.