Backups Alone Aren’t a Disaster Recovery Plan.
The auditor asks for the results of your last disaster recovery test, and the honest answer is that you’ve never run one. You have backups, but nobody has written down which systems come back first, how long that takes, or who makes the call. Disaster recovery planning answers those questions in writing and then proves the answers with a test. If you need the backup and replication service itself, see backup and disaster recovery as a service.
What Goes Into a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Maryland Municipality Leverages Dataprise for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan Creation
A Maryland municipality had a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) but no formal disaster recovery plan, so Dataprise ran a business impact analysis across its key departments, set recovery targets for each application, and tested the new plan with staff through tabletop exercises.
How We Build and Test Your Plan
Our consultants work with you to build business continuity and disaster recovery plans that work in a real outage, not just on paper. A typical engagement has four steps:
Assess. We review your current backups, systems and any existing plan, and interview the people who’d be making decisions during an outage.
Plan. We write the business impact analysis, recovery targets, runbooks and contact tree with your team, so the plan matches how your business actually runs.
Test. We run a tabletop exercise and a technical failover test, then record what worked and what didn’t.
Roadmap. You get a prioritized list of gaps to close and a maturity roadmap for the next 12 months.
How Often Should You Test a Disaster Recovery Plan?
At least once a year, and again after any major change such as a cloud migration, a new ERP or EHR, or an acquisition. A tabletop exercise (walking through a scenario around a table) tests the decisions. A technical failover test proves the systems actually come back within your RTO. You need both.
Compare your options
Disaster recovery planning vs. backup and disaster recovery as a service
| Feature | The planDR planning and consulting | The infrastructureBDRaaS |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A written, tested plan and a maturity roadmap | Managed backups and failover infrastructure |
| Format | Project or annual engagement | Monthly service |
| Answers | What do we do, in what order, and how fast? |
Is the data there, and can we restore it? |
| You need it when | An auditor, regulator, insurer, or board asks for a plan | You don’t trust your current backups |
| Talk to a DR consultant | Explore BDRaaS |
Most organizations need both. A plan without tested backups is fiction, and backups without a plan turn a four-hour outage into a two-day one.
Let’s Get Started!
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