Disaster Recovery 101

What is a disaster recovery team? A disaster recovery, or DR, team is a group of individuals who are tasked with developing, documenting, and executing processes and procedures for an organization's data recovery, business continuity, and IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster or failure.

To ensure data availability and business continuity, every organization should have a group of people dedicated to developing and documenting a disaster recovery plan. This disaster recovery team is in charge of not only developing the disaster recovery plan but also of developing and implementing the processes and procedures that will facilitate data recovery and integrity. To ensure the effectiveness of a disaster recovery plan, it must be updated and tested on a regular basis, so the team will be responsible for these tasks as well.

Who should be on your DR planning team?

Executive team members will not need to be deeply engaged in Disaster Recovery planning, but they must be present for supervision. Approval is required for multiple objectives. Training and testing are critical components of any disaster recovery. Following the plan's implementation, the team will have to conduct ongoing assessments to achieve greater efficiency. Some issues and opportunities will arise that no one expected during the development or early risk analysis. These challenges must be resolved ahead of time when the group's disaster recovery plan is most needed. Routine testing allows team members to become more acquainted with their obligations in the case of a catastrophe, which reduces the likelihood of human error or uncertainty when that time comes.