Why Every Business Needs Disaster Recovery
21 April 2026 · 5 min read
Ask a leadership team what happens if their systems are unavailable tomorrow morning. The uncomfortable part is not usually the answer — it is that there is no answer.
Four questions worth answering before you need to
A disaster recovery plan exists to make these answerable in advance, in writing, by someone other than the person who built the system.
- How quickly can we operate again?
- Where do we restore systems to?
- Which systems come back first, and in what order?
- Who makes the decision to invoke the plan?
The realistic threats
Ransomware, hardware failure, accidental deletion, power and cooling events, and departing staff account for the overwhelming majority of business interruptions. None of them is exotic, and all of them are planned for in the same way.
What a usable plan contains
Agreed recovery targets per system. A backup architecture that includes offsite and immutable copies. Restore tests with recorded durations. A runbook written for someone under pressure, naming systems, sequence, credentials location, and decision owners. And a review schedule, because infrastructure changes and plans go stale.
Resilience is a design decision made before the incident, not a response improvised during one.