Colocation to bolster your business continuity

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Disaster recovery > business continuity

Disaster recovery planning is a crucial subset of business continuity planning, primarily focused on processes and procedures required to restore servers, applications, data, and security systems after a disruptive event. Without it, most other business continuity efforts will prove ineffective.

While large organisations have widely adopted business continuity measures, smaller businesses often lag. A 2025 survey from Databarrack revealed that while 97% of large organisations have business continuity plans, only 58% of smaller companies can say the same. This gap exposes a significant portion of the economy to risk.

Role of colocation in business continuity and disaster recovery

The complexity of your disaster recovery plan depends heavily on your existing infrastructure. For businesses that have adopted a cloud-first strategy, continuity can be remarkably simple. If the business premises are inaccessible for whatever reason, employees can simply work from home or another location with an internet connection, accessing everything they need from the cloud.

For businesses with on-/off-premise or hybrid solutions, the plan becomes more intricate. If your business critical IT and workloads are on premise and under your control, then you must analyse backup procedures, test them rigorously, and outline emergency processes. This often involves identifying a secondary disaster recovery site where you can restore operations. You will need detailed restoration procedures and a method for collecting data from the incident to learn and improve future responses. If you have equipment and workloads off premise, the data centre will already form a key part of your disaster recovery plan.

10 steps to developing a disaster recovery plan

Assemble a disaster recovery team

Identify the key personnel responsible for creating, implementing, and maintaining the plan. Assign clear roles, from team leaders to IT specialists and communication coordinators, to ensure a coordinated response.

Conduct a risk assessment

Identify all potential risks to your business, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, hardware failures, and human error. Assess the likelihood of each event and its potential impact on your operations.

Perform a business impact analysis (BIA)

Determine which business functions are most critical. Use this analysis for each essential process to define:

  • the recovery time objective/RTO (the maximum acceptable amount of time your business can afford for a system to be offline before normal operations must resume);
  • the recovery point objective/RPO (the maximum amount of data that can be lost without causing significant harm to the business – e.g. an RPO of one hour means you must have backups that are no more than an hour old).

A full systems audit and inventory

Document every component of your IT environment. This inventory should include all hardware, software, data repositories, and network infrastructure, providing a clear picture of what needs protection.

Define recovery strategies

Develop strategies to restore your critical systems and data. This may involve backup and restore solutions, redundant systems with automatic failover, or arrangements for alternative work locations.

Create a communication plan

Establish clear protocols for communicating with internal teams, stakeholders, and customers during a crisis.

Document the disaster recovery plan

Write a detailed, step-by-step guide for your recovery procedures. This document should include team responsibilities, contact lists, backup schedules, and escalation paths.

Test the plan

Conduct regular disaster recovery drills and simulations to ensure it works as intended and to identify any weaknesses before a real incident occurs.

Train employees

Educate all employees on their roles and responsibilities during a disaster.

Review and update the plan

Review and update your disaster recovery plan at least annually so it remains relevant based on changes in technology, business processes, or risks.

Colocation for resilience

By housing their critical IT infrastructure in a purpose-built colocation facility, businesses offload the immense responsibility of managing and securing many key elements of physical infrastructure and gain access to a level of security and resilience that is difficult and costly to achieve on their own. In fact, many of our clients cite disaster recovery as a key reason for leveraging our facilities.

Our colocation provides the secure, reliable, and scalable foundation needed to safeguard their systems and data offering: robust multi-layered physical security and on-site security personnel; redundant power supplies, advanced cooling systems, and fire suppression technology; geographic diversity; reliable backup and recovery; carrier-neutral connectivity; and guaranteed uptime SLAs.

Talk to us or come and tour our state-of-the-art colocation facilities in Farnborough and Manchester to learn how we can help you ensure business resilience just in case the worst really does happen.

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