It’s hard to watch a business make the news for the wrong reasons—especially when a data breach or cyberattack is the headline. The fallout is rarely just technical. Customers lose trust, operations grind to a halt, and leadership scrambles to explain what went wrong. Most of the time, the underlying issue is the same: the business wasn’t prepared. No plan, no backup, no path forward.
Disaster recovery best practices exist for exactly this reason, and following them doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s talk about what your business needs to be prepared.
Stay Ahead of System or Data Breaches
Most businesses assume a breach won’t happen to them. That assumption is expensive. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, it takes an average of 204 days just to identify a breach—meaning the damage is often well underway before anyone realizes something is wrong.
The businesses that come out the other side relatively unscathed aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that planned ahead. They treated disaster recovery best practices not as an afterthought, but as a core part of running responsibly. As a business owner, your goal should be to avoid learning that lesson the hard way.
Best Practices to Keep You Secure
If your business were hit by a cyberattack tomorrow, would you know what to do? Here are the disaster recovery best practices every business owner should have in place before that question becomes urgent.
Back Up Your Data—and Test Those Backups
A backup is only useful if it actually works when you need it. Back up critical data regularly (ideally with automated, scheduled backups running throughout the day), store copies offsite and in the cloud, and test restoration periodically. Many businesses skip the testing step and find out too late that their backups were corrupted or incomplete.
Define Your Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives
Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is how quickly your systems need to be restored after a disaster. Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is how much data loss your business can tolerate. Defining both upfront shapes every other decision in your recovery plan—from what you back up to how often you do it.
Document a Clear Response Plan
When systems go down, panic sets in fast. A written disaster recovery plan tames the chaos. It should outline who is responsible for what, how communication will be handled internally and externally, and the exact steps needed to restore operations. The plan should live somewhere accessible, not just on the system that might be compromised.
Limit Access to Sensitive Systems
Not everyone in your organization needs access to everything. Role-based permissions reduce the risk that a single compromised account can bring down your entire operation. Pair this with multi-factor authentication across all key systems and you’ve added a meaningful layer of defense.
Train Your Team
Human error remains one of the most common entry points for cyberattacks. Phishing emails, weak passwords, and accidental data exposure are largely preventable with consistent staff training. Make cybersecurity awareness part of your onboarding and run periodic refreshers—especially as new threats evolve.
Review and Update Your Plan Regularly
A disaster recovery plan written two years ago may not account for the tools, staff, or threats your business faces today. Schedule at least an annual review—and revisit the plan any time your infrastructure changes significantly. Keeping your disaster recovery best practices current is just as important as instituting them in the first place.
Let Solutions in Data Build Your Safety Net
Following disaster recovery best practices is something every business can start doing today. But putting a full plan in place—one that actually holds up under pressure—takes expertise that most small business owners simply don’t have time to develop on their own.
As a full-service IT company serving small businesses in Chicago and across Illinois, Solutions in Data helps you build and maintain a data backup and recovery strategy tailored to your business’s needs, so no matter what happens on-site, your files are recoverable.
Don’t wait until something goes wrong to figure out what your plan is. Reach out to Solutions in Data today and get a strategy in place before you ever need it.
