How to set up a disaster recovery plan for your office or facility

Most Indian SMEs have no documented plan for what happens if their primary office or facility is unavailable — due to fire, flood, power failure, or any other disruptive event. When the event happens, they improvise, lose critical time, and sometimes lose critical data.

A disaster recovery plan doesn't need to be complex. For most businesses, it needs to answer four questions: Where do we work if we can't access this building? How do we access our systems and data remotely? Who is responsible for making which decisions? How do we communicate with our team, clients, and suppliers during the disruption?

Backup work location: identify your backup option before you need it. For most knowledge-work companies, this means the ability to work remotely — which requires laptops (not desktops), cloud-hosted systems, and VPN access to anything on-premises. For manufacturing companies, it means understanding which critical functions can temporarily operate from an alternative location and which can't.

Data backup is non-negotiable. All critical data should be backed up daily to a location separate from your primary office — cloud backup is the standard solution. If your backup is on a server in the same building, a fire or flood destroys both. Test your backups quarterly — many companies have backup systems that haven't been tested and don't actually restore correctly.

Communication tree: who calls whom? Define a cascade — the founder calls department heads, department heads call their teams, and so on. Include personal mobile numbers, not just work numbers. Test the cascade annually.

Critical contacts and contracts: maintain a document (stored in the cloud, accessible from anywhere) with your critical vendor contacts, insurance policy numbers, lease details, banking contacts, and key client contacts. If your main office is inaccessible and you need to call your insurance company or your most important client, you should be able to find that information in 2 minutes from any location.

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