Cybersecurity and Business Continuity: Strategies to Support Disaster Recovery Planning

A disaster recovery plan can help your business restore critical systems, recover data, and keep operations moving when cyber incidents or other disruptions hit.

And the risk is real. NIST says modern cyber incidents are more frequent, more damaging, and often take weeks or months to recover from, not just a day or two. According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware was involved in about 44% of data breaches.

No set of security controls can prevent every attack, but strong preparation can mean the difference between recovering in hours and facing weeks of disruption. If you don’t have a plan yet, now is the time to start.

Why Cyberattacks Are a Business Continuity Concern

Business continuity means being able to keep your operations going, or at least get them running again quickly, after something goes wrong. Historically, businesses have been most concerned with physical disruptions like fires, floods, or power outages.

Today, cyberattacks can be just as disruptive, if not more so.

IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 76% of organizations needed more than 100 days to fully recover from a cyber-attack. For a small business, that kind of disruption can have serious operational and financial consequences.

A disaster recovery plan helps organizations respond more calmly and effectively rather than reacting under pressure. Think of it as your organization’s emergency playbook.

What Are Some Elements of an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a written document that outlines how your business can respond to and recover from a cyberattack or other major disruption. It doesn’t need to be lengthy – just something practical that your team can follow under pressure.

Here are some important points to consider:

1. Know What You’re Protecting

Start with a risk assessment and a business impact analysis. In plain terms: figure out what systems and data your business depends on and think about what would happen if each one went down. For many organizations, systems such as customer databases or accounting platforms probably more critical than archival marketing files.

Once identified, rank these systems by their importance to business operations. This ranking will help guide many other decisions in your plan, from how often you back up systems to how quickly they need to be restored.
 

2. Set Your Recovery Targets

This is where a good plan gets specific. For each critical system, define two targets:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): how quickly the system needs to be back
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): how much data loss you can tolerate

For example, your website might be able to tolerate a longer outage than your payroll system. Your accounting system might need to be restored with minimal data loss, while an internal archive can likely wait.

This sounds technical, but it is really a business conversation. If leadership cannot answer how long a system can be down before the pain becomes unacceptable, the recovery team is left to make that call under pressure. That is a bad time to improvise. NIST’s business impact analysis highlights this process as a useful way to document recovery objectives and prioritize restoration based on business impact.
 

3. Get Your Backup Strategy Right

Backups are one of the most critical components of a disaster recovery plan. Without clean, working backups, recovering from a ransomware attack can be extremely challenging.

A good rule of thumb is the 3-2-1 method: keep three copies of important data, store them on two different types of media, and keep one copy off-site (like in the cloud).

One more thing that’s easy to overlook: at least one of those backups should be air-gapped or immutable. That means it can’t be changed or encrypted by malware, even if an attacker gets into your network. In many cases, this can be what separates businesses that recover quickly from those who face much longer disruptions.
 

4. Incident Response Procedures

When a cybersecurity incident occurs, the first few hours are critical. Your team should know what actions to take without waiting for direction.

At a minimum, your plan should outline:

• How to isolate affected systems (disconnect from the network, turn off Wi-Fi) to help prevent the incident from spreading
• How to assess what’s been hit and what data may be affected
• When and how to start restoring from backups
• Who should be notified (customers, regulators, law enforcement, your cyber insurance carrier)

NIST’s 2025 incident-response guidance emphasizes that recovery is part of broader cybersecurity risk management and should be integrated across organizational operations. The guidance also recommends that small businesses should include multiple functional areas, such as communications and business leadership, when executing the recovery plan and coordinating restoration with internal and external parties.
 

5. Communication Plan

If your email is down, how do you reach your team? If your website is offline, how do you update customers? These decisions are best made before an incident occurs.

• Keep a printed emergency contact list with personal phone numbers
• Establish a backup communication method (such as a group text thread, a messaging app, or a phone tree)
• Draft templates for customer and stakeholder notifications ahead of time, so they are ready if an incident occurs

Understand applicable breach notification requirements.  In some jurisdictions, organizations may be required to notify regulators or affected individuals within a defined timeframe.

Test the Plan Before You Need It

Ready.gov’s guidance recommends identifying probable emergency and business disruption scenarios and using them as the basis for tabletop exercises. This can be as simple as gathering key personnel to walk through a ransomware event, a cloud outage, or a major hardware failure.

Testing doesn’t have to be complicated:

• Tabletop exercises: Sit down with your team and walk through a scenario. “Our accounting system has just been encrypted. What do we do first? Who calls who?” These exercises often reveal gaps or questions that might otherwise be missed.
• Backup restoration tests: Select a file, make a copy and place it aside. Delete the original and try to restore it from your backup.
• Failover drills: If you have a secondary system or cloud-based recovery environment, practice switching to it. The best part: you don't have to take your live environment down to do it; run it as a parallel test, keeping production running while you validate that the failover actually works. Testing helps confirm the failover process works before it is needed.
• After-action reviews: After each test, write down what worked and what didn’t. Update the plan. It’s what helps improve your plan over time.

Common Pitfalls in Disaster Recovery Planning

Recurring problems that can trip businesses up (even those that do have a plan) include:

• Backing up files but not systems. Restoring a folder of documents is one thing. Rebuilding your entire server from scratch because you didn’t back up configurations, applications, or system images? That can create a far more complex recovery scenario.
• Trusting that backups are clean. Some ransomware sits quietly in your system for weeks before it activates. That means your most recent backups could already be infected. Air-gapped and immutable backups provide an important safeguard against this risk.
• No plan for working without technology. What if your systems are down for days? The key is defining these processes before an incident occurs; not scrambling to figure them out during a crisis. Consider questions such as whether orders can be taken manually or payments processed through another method. Even a basic business continuity plan for offline operations can help keep your operations running while systems are restored.
• Skipping employee training. A well-designed plan is only effective if the people executing it are prepared. Regular security awareness training and practice drills make a real difference.

Quick-Start Checklist

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan yet, or if your current plan needs a refresh, here’s a helpful starting point:

1. List your most important systems and data. Rank them by how significantly a shutdown would impact your business.
    
2. Identify the most likely cyber threats you face (ransomware, phishing, insider mistakes) and how each one could impact your organization.
    
3. Set recovery time and acceptable data loss targets for each system.
    
4. Set up backups using the 3-2-1 rule. Ensure at least one backup is immutable or air-gapped.
    
5. Document step-by-step procedures for containment, eradication, and recovery.
    
6. Assign roles so everyone understands their responsibilities during an incident.
    
7. Build a communication plan with backup channels, printed contact lists, and pre-drafted notification templates.
    
8. Schedule regular tests, including tabletop exercises and backup restoration tests.
    
9. Review and update the plan whenever your business operations or your technology changes.
    
10. If this feels like a lot, consider bringing in a managed IT or cybersecurity advisor to help you develop a plan. Getting it right the first time can help reduce disruption later.

Need Help Getting Started?

You don’t have to build this alone. Acrisure Cyber Services works with small and mid-sized businesses to develop disaster recovery and business continuity plans tailored to how they operate. We can provide access to secure data backup and disaster recovery solutions, 24/7 monitoring, and incident response support, all backed by a team of 250+ certified cybersecurity and IT professionals.

Don’t wait for a crisis to find out you’re not prepared. 

Reach out to [email protected] for a no-obligation cybersecurity and IT consultation and get a complimentary risk exposure assessment. We’ll review where you stand, identify any gaps, and help you walk away with insights on solutions that can work for your business.

^{The information provided is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to as professional advice.  Cybersecurity and business continuity planning should be tailored to each organization’s specific needs and circumstances.  The information presented may not apply to all businesses and should not be relied upon as a substitute for tailored professional guidance.}