The 3 critical areas for Disaster Recovery Plan or Business Continuity Plan activities include management of:

1. Data
2. Communication
3. People

The 5-5-5 list is not an exhaustive list meant to provide ‘comprehensive coverage’ but will allow your company to cover the basics by implementing these simple procedures.

Use this 5 Step process for protecting your company’s data:

1. Get familiar with your data, what data is critical and where it is stored. (Remember to account for laptop data as well.)
2. Consider your backup options. The best options would be off-site, secure and available 24/7. You can also utilize tape backup or other media. (If you do outsource your backup operations, take care to ensure security, monitoring and support.)
3. Decide who will manage your backups (and have a backup for that person).
4. Run through the recovery process. The best time to find problems with your recovery process if before you actually need it.
5. Do regular reviews to make sure everything that needs to be backed up is getting backed up. Did you add a new server?

Use this 5 step process for handling communication:

1. Have regularly updated contact lists. Include cell phones, gmail accounts, and phone numbers of employee relatives out of state. (This will allow you to get a complete employee accounting in the event your normal communication methods fail or are inoperable.)
2. Decide on a communication plan, who will communicate, how often, and by what means.
3. Make sure employees know to check in (with the company) and how to do this within 24 hours (or whatever time period you decide).
4. Make arrangements for your customers contact you. Consider a VoIP system like Grasshopper or Vonage that allows you to forward your office lines to other numbers.
5. Upload documents to an on-line location that’s accessible from anywhere. Secure on-line document storage sites like vSafe (from Wells Fargo Bank) or www.lockyourdocs.com are available to accomplish this for your company.

Use this 5 step process for managing People in an emergency:

1. Develop communication methods for drafting email messages, contacting clients and vendors as well as handling insurance claims.
2. Decide who is responsible for these critical functions (and make sure you’ve got a backup person for these functions).
3. Designate an alternative (or multiple alternative) locations for your employees to continue their work.
4. Develop your plan with help from (and ultimately buy-in from employees as well as upper management), and make sure that it is distributed to all your employees. (You may want to consider uploading a copy to the on-line accessible location for future reference).
5. Test the plan with realistic run-throughs, look for flaws in the plan and then make changes as needed.