Create a state of organizational preparedness with a holistic and strategic approach to disaster response. Ensure your capacities for crisis management, IT disaster recovery, and emergency activities are aligned and able to coordinate at a moment’s notice should any type of disruption arise, be it a natural disaster or a cyberattack. Identify vulnerable assets, processes, and personnel within your organization and their related risks so that you respond correctly should any incident occur. Develop a strategy for recoverability should preventative measures fail as well.

Protect critical personnel, equipment, and IT infrastructure from a wide range of dangers—including theft, supply chain disruptions, and extreme weather events, among others. Protect your financial assets against theft as well as your brand against reputational dangers, including criminal activity or libel. Identify methods to improve organizational and asset resiliency, even as you prepare to respond to incidents that might disrupt, damage, or destroy critical resources.

Define all tiers of threats that could put your business at risk. Develop comprehensive prevention and response strategies that expand and change as those threats evolve. Adopt the right tools and skillsets to identify emerging physical, digital, or reputational dangers before they cause problems. Secure the means to report or eliminate threats as they arise.

Ensure you have resources prepared should an incident and a subsequent crisis occur. Prepare your teams for rapid and effective decision making that will mitigate operational, financial, or reputational damage. Create standards for formal analyses and improvement plans once a crisis is eliminated or subsides.

Ensure your immediate response to dangerous or even life-threatening disasters drives the best possible outcomes for your people. Adopt protective measures for at-risk employees that minimize physical harm and align with industry-specific regulatory requirements. Formalize and train employees on specific guidelines for coordinating with emergency responders. Align those efforts with your broader business resiliency and continuity strategy.

Define your organization’s requirements for successful disaster recovery of IT assets, and adopt resources and capabilities that will ensure those requirements can be met. Partner with cloud providers that specialize in IT disaster recovery capabilities. Integrate your IT disaster recovery solutions with your asset protection, threat detection, and crisis management policies as well.

Determine the base characteristics of a successful restoration of business processes and assets. These should include the requisite resources, IT infrastructure, business channels, supply chain resources, and personnel for business continuity as recovery processes continue. Restore your operations to acceptable levels within an appropriate timeframe as you move to improve future prevention and crisis management capabilities.

Establish formal review and improvement techniques executable after response, recovery, and restoration. Evaluate and improve your organization’s recoverability prospects, and translate new strategies into education and awareness programs for related employees. Define the resources you require to prevent similar disruptions and adopt those resources as well.