Disaster Recovery Planning for Small Business

Nobody wants to think about disaster recovery. But the businesses that plan for it are the ones that survive when things go wrong.

Why This Matters

Disaster recovery isn’t about preparing for a Hollywood-style catastrophe. It’s about having a plan for the things that actually happen:

  • A server hard drive fails on a Monday morning
  • Ransomware encrypts everything on the network
  • A pipe bursts and floods the server closet
  • A critical employee leaves and takes institutional knowledge with them
  • The internet goes down for eight hours during your busiest season

These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. They happen to Kansas City businesses regularly. The difference between a bad day and a business-ending event often comes down to whether you have a plan.

The Basics: What to Plan For

Data Loss

This is the big one. If your data disappeared right now — customer records, financial data, email, project files — could you get it back? How much would you lose? How long would it take?

The 3-2-1 backup rule:

  • 3 copies of your data
  • 2 different types of storage (e.g., local drive + cloud)
  • 1 copy offsite or in the cloud

This ensures that no single event — fire, theft, hardware failure, ransomware — can take out all your copies.

System Downtime

How long can your business operate without its core systems? For some businesses, a few hours of downtime is annoying but survivable. For others, every hour down costs real money.

Two key metrics to think about:

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly do you need to be back up and running?
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data can you afford to lose? If your last backup was 24 hours ago, you’re losing a day’s worth of work.

Your backup and recovery strategy should match these numbers. If your RTO is four hours, daily tape backups stored across town won’t cut it. If your RPO is one hour, you need backups running at least that frequently.

Communication

When something goes down, how do you communicate with your team and your customers? If your email server is the thing that failed, you need a backup communication plan.

  • Who needs to be notified?
  • How will you reach them if normal channels are down?
  • What do you tell customers?
  • Who makes decisions about recovery priorities?

Physical Access

If you can’t get to your office — weather, fire, flooding — can your team still work? Cloud-based systems and VPN access can make remote work possible, but only if they’re set up in advance.

Building Your Plan

Step 1: Inventory What Matters

List every system, application, and data set your business depends on. Then rank them by criticality:

  • Critical: Business stops without this (email, accounting system, customer database)
  • Important: Business is impaired without this (file shares, secondary applications)
  • Nice to have: Inconvenient to lose but not business-threatening

Step 2: Identify Your Risks

What’s most likely to go wrong in your environment? Hardware failure is the most common cause of downtime for small businesses, followed by ransomware and human error. Focus your planning on the most likely scenarios first.

Step 3: Set Your Recovery Targets

For each critical system, define your RTO and RPO. Be realistic — faster recovery costs more. The goal is to match your investment to the actual business impact of downtime.

Step 4: Implement Backup and Recovery Solutions

Based on your recovery targets:

  • Local backup (NAS, external drive) for fast recovery of everyday issues
  • Cloud backup for offsite protection against physical disasters and ransomware
  • Image-based backup for full system recovery (not just files, but the entire server configuration)
  • Cloud-based systems that don’t depend on your physical office

Step 5: Document and Test

A plan that exists only in someone’s head isn’t a plan. Write it down:

  • What gets backed up and how often
  • Where backups are stored
  • Who is responsible for recovery
  • Step-by-step recovery procedures
  • Contact lists for vendors and team members

Then test it. Actually restore from backup. Simulate a server failure. Make sure the plan works before you need it for real. Test at least once a year — more often for critical systems.

Common Mistakes

“We use cloud apps, so we don’t need backup.” Cloud providers protect against their infrastructure failing, not against you accidentally deleting data or an attacker compromising your account. You still need backup for cloud data.

“We have a backup drive.” A backup drive sitting next to the server gets encrypted by ransomware just like the server does. Offsite or cloud backup is essential.

“We tested our backups once, two years ago.” Backup systems break silently. Regular testing is non-negotiable.

“Our IT guy handles all of this.” What happens when your IT guy is on vacation, or leaves the company? Recovery procedures need to be documented well enough that someone else can follow them.

Need help putting a plan together? Let’s talk — we’ll help you figure out what you need to protect and the most practical way to do it.