Disasters, be it natural or manmade, cannot be predicted or discounted while preparing regular business plans. It is important to accept this fact and plan for contingencies to overcome such emergency situations. A disaster recovery plan or in short DRP, must be in place before every business review meeting of any organization. This DRP must also be up to date and must ensure that all the business objectives of the organizations are taken care of. An essential feature the disaster recovery plan template is the ability to incorporate changes in its structure, without impacting the business objectives. The success and failure of a DRP depends on two aspects; Business objectives of the organization and Employee awareness and participation.

Business Objectives: All organizations have a robust business plan that includes client, employee and stakeholder satisfaction. All aspects of each of the above mentioned parameters are well covered. Aspects like: client requirements, client interests, client information safe-guardance, employee comfort, employee requirements, stakeholder satisfaction, revenue/profit increase, etc. are well covered in any organizations business plan. It is important to continue with the performance of the organization without any impact to its plan, even during emergencies and calamities. A robust DRP must cover the interests of the businesses and must provide step by step plans to ensure that there is no impact on the objectives. Risks must be identified and mitigations must be instructed in the disaster recovery plan template. Periodic reviews with clients, employees and stakeholders can ensure that the DRP document is up to date and in working condition.

Employee awareness: Even the best laid out DRP can fail at a critical juncture if the employees who are responsible to implement them, fail in their tasks. This is a real possibility and in fact, it is the main reason why many DRP plans fail during implementation. All the employees need to be aware of not only the impact on their respective functions; but also on the overall business impact. The disaster recovery plan template is a dynamic document and it is unreasonable on the management’s part to expect every employee to be aware of all the aspects in the plan. It is therefore important to have a comprehensive activity breakdown for all critical activities which can enable even untrained employees to follow instructions and complete the activities. Another way to increase employee awareness is by involving them in the DRP creation process and adding their inputs in the plan. Periodic reviews can also help the employees to be oriented to this living document.