Does your business have an IT disaster recovery plan?

Your team arrives at work, but the files won’t open. Orders are waiting and customers are calling. What happens next?

It doesn’t take a cyberattack to stop work. Failed equipment, a power problem or damage to your office can do it too.

A disaster recovery plan explains how you’ll get your systems and information back. Backups are part of it, but you also need to know who will act, where staff will work and what needs recovering first.

What needs to come back first?

List the systems you need to serve customers and get work done. That might be bookings, job records, accounting or specialist software.

Decide how long you could manage without each one and how much recent work you could recreate. If you restored yesterday’s information, could you reconstruct today’s orders?

Give those priorities to your IT provider. Ask whether your current backup and recovery setup can meet them, what is excluded and what has been tested.

Where will your team work from?

If the office is unavailable, will staff work from home, another location or a temporary workspace?

Check that they will have the equipment, internet connection and secure access they need. Can they open the right applications, find customer records and answer calls from there?

Working from home won’t help if the system everyone needs is in an office with no power. Include those dependencies in the plan, along with any roles that cannot work remotely.

Try the alternative location before you need it. Have someone carry out their normal tasks there and note what gets in the way.

Who does what?

Agree who calls IT, who can approve urgent work and who updates staff and customers. Include backup contacts in case someone is unavailable.

Keep those details somewhere accessible if email and shared files are down. Decide how people will receive updates, what work can continue safely and what must wait.

If you use a temporary process to record orders or appointments, assign someone to reconcile them when the main system returns.

Has recovery been tested?

A successful backup notification doesn’t tell you how long it will take to get working again.

Ask your provider what was restored in the last test and whether someone checked they could use it. Recovering one document is different from recovering a whole business application.

Talk through a disruption with your team as well. Can they find the contacts, get to the alternative workplace and explain what they would do first?

Write down the gaps and give each one an owner. Technical recovery tests should be planned with your provider so they don’t disrupt normal work. The Australian Cyber Security Centre has useful guidance on testing backups.

If a cyberattack is involved, recovery also needs to address the cause. Restoring files alone doesn’t make a compromised system safe.

Put the essentials on one page

Use this as a starting worksheet, with your provider keeping the technical recovery instructions behind it.

Question	Your plan
What comes back first?	Critical systems, recovery order and acceptable downtime.
What can we restore?	Backup coverage, acceptable data loss and the last test result.
Where will staff work?	Alternative location, equipment, internet and system access.
Who takes charge?	Decision-makers, IT contacts and who gives updates.
What happens while we wait?	Work that can continue, work that must pause and temporary records to reconcile.

Keep a protected copy where you can reach it during an interruption. Review it when people or systems change.

We help Northern Beaches businesses work through their recovery arrangements at Vaelis IT. Book a 15-minute IT chat through our Contact page if you’d like help getting started.