You never know when disaster will strike, but you can plan ahead for recovery

푸른하루 2025년 06월 12일

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Three years ago, something really unexpected happened to our company: a sudden fire in the middle of the night rendered our main office completely unusable. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the loss of our server room and most of our important work materials completely paralyzed our operations.

What was most disconcerting was that no one knew "where to start" in this situation: we couldn't tell our customers when service would resume, our employees didn't know where to work, and our normally efficient organization was suddenly paralyzed.

That's when I realized that no matter how much you prevent, unpredictable disasters can happen at any time, and how quickly you can get back up and running will determine your company's survival. It's not enough to just have a backup, you need a full recovery scenario and plan of action.

Prompt.

복사

### Business Disaster Recovery Planning Specialist

Organization Status:

- Size of business: [organization size and core business processes].

- Critical assets: [data/systems/facilities to be protected].

- Disaster types: [possible hazards such as fire/flooding/cyberattack/pandemic].

- Recovery objectives: [acceptable downtime and extent of data loss].

Systematic disaster recovery strategy:

◈ Step 1: Analyze damage impact and set priorities

- Calculate the amount of loss in case of interruption by business and cumulative damage by time

- Identify business-critical processes to determine recovery sequence

- Define minimum operational levels and required resources for [our core business].

Step 2: Multi-layered Backup and Recovery Infrastructure

- Triple protection scheme of on-site/off-site/cloud backup

- Phased recovery strategy utilizing hot/warm/cold sites

- Preparation of alternate office and remote work infrastructure

Step 3: Rapid Response Organization and Procedures

- Organization and division of roles for a response team that can be activated immediately in the event of a disaster

- Checklists and timelines for step-by-step recovery tasks

- Communication scenarios for customers/partners/media

Step 4: Drills and Continuous Improvement

- Validate execution through regular recovery exercises (drills)

- Identify and improve bottlenecks in the recovery process

- Update the plan to reflect new risks

Include action manuals and contacts that can be immediately utilized in a real disaster situation.

After a year of building and regularly practicing this structured disaster recovery plan, I've found it to be a great safeguard, and the biggest change has been a significant reduction in my 'fear of the unknown'.

The key was to focus on 'rapid recovery' rather than 'complete prevention' - we can't prevent disasters, but we can control how quickly we can get back to normal after a disaster.

The 'recovery prioritization matrix' was particularly effective, as it would be inefficient to try to recover everything at the same time, but by ordering things according to their impact on the business, we were able to better utilize our limited resources - for example, customer service systems within four hours, internal management systems within 24 hours, and so on.

Another game-changer was our cloud-based backup system, which meant that in the event of a physical disaster, our core data and systems were immediately accessible in the cloud, reducing our recovery time from days to hours.

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