Request Multiple Quotes from Disaster Recovery Providers and Vendors

The challenge

The solution

The outcome

Requirements

• Define business requirements, critical systems, and acceptable downtime/data loss targets (RTO/RPO).
• Classify data and applications by criticality and recovery priority.
• Identify risks, failure scenarios, and recovery dependencies.
• Choose backup types, frequency, retention, and storage locations.
• Use the 3-2-1 rule with at least one offsite and one immutable/air-gapped copy.
• Encrypt backups in transit and at rest; control access with least privilege and MFA.
• Document backup scope, ownership, schedules, and escalation contacts.
• Automate backups and monitor success/failure alerts.
• Include databases, virtual machines, endpoints, cloud services, and configuration data.
• Test restores regularly, including file, system, application, and full-site recovery.
• Validate backup integrity, completeness, and recoverability.
• Define disaster-recovery architecture, failover/failback steps, and alternate processing sites.
• Maintain infrastructure-as-code, golden images, and configuration backups where possible.
• Ensure DNS, identity, network, and third-party dependencies are covered in recovery plans.
• Set retention, legal, regulatory, and compliance requirements.
• Create incident-response, communication, and decision-making procedures.
• Train staff and assign clear roles and responsibilities.
• Review costs, capacity, and scalability against growth and risk.
• Update the strategy after system changes, incidents, and test results.

Best practices

• 1. Define clear recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) for each critical system.
• 2. Classify data by business criticality and compliance requirements.
• 3. Back up both on-premises and cloud workloads.
• 4. Follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule where possible.
• 5. Use immutable and/or air-gapped backups to defend against ransomware.
• 6. Encrypt data in transit and at rest.
• 7. Verify backup integrity with regular automated backup validation.
• 8. Test restores frequently, not just backups.
• 9. Create and maintain a documented disaster-recovery runbook.
• 10. Ensure backups are monitored with alerting for failures, delays, and anomalies.
• 11. Choose software with granular recovery options for files, apps, VMs, and databases.
• 12. Confirm scalability for current and future data growth.
• 13. Review vendor security, compliance, and data-residency capabilities.
• 14. Include role-based access control and multi-factor authentication for admin access.
• 15. Evaluate total cost of ownership, including storage, retention, egress, and recovery costs.