In business, as in other aspects of life, there is a familiar expression about “best-laid plans.”

In business, and especially many IT aspects of contemporary business, IT Disaster Recovery Planning is vital and detailed strategy. IT Disaster Recovery Planning emphasizes the critical importance of collected data as one of a business’s most valuable assets.

Effective disaster recovery planning is not only about fixes and the specifics of IT technology. An important part of disaster recovery planning is understanding how devastating and expensive an IT disaster can be.

Perhaps it is natural disasters or the surge in cyber threats that are getting more common and complex, IT Disaster Recovery Planning is essential for the smooth function of an organization as well as minimizing the time and money costs when disaster strikes.

By far, the most effective disaster recovery planning strategy is customization. The detailed analysis to determine the business’s unique situations and needs and the likely and possible threats that must be factored-in. Optimized IT Disaster Recovery Planning strategy outlines the vital steps to address any potential failure, across each component of the business’s entire IT system, and ensuring that the plan strategy is customized for the business’s specific priorities and ways of doing things.

Simply put, a disaster recovery plan is a documented, structured approach that describes how an organization can quickly resume work after an unplanned incident. Proper IT disaster recovery planning and strategy allows the organization to resolve data loss, recover system functionality and resume mission-critical functions in the aftermath of an incident.

IT disaster recovery planning enables the business to handle incidents, reduce downtime and minimize financial and reputational damages of the organization. An important aspect of IT disaster recovery planning strategy is the recovery time objective (RTO)— the amount of time critical applications can be down, typically measured in hours, minutes or seconds.

Disaster recovery IT experts emphasize that the best defense is proactivity. It is the optimal way to ensure that, if an interruption happens, the business has the effective peace of mind that data is securely backed up, the business is ready to activate recovery protocols, and that there is expert IT support at the click of a button.