In order to be ready for those inevitable situations, we recommend that  enterprises and businesses alike put together a disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan. And because so much of today's business takes place digitally, that means making a plan for how to get your IT systems back online after an outage.

Australian Technology Partners can assist with helping your organisation prepare and implement strategies plans tailored for your business for any disaster through the following best practices:

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• Create a written plan. The biggest mistake companies can make when it comes to DR is not having a plan. If you don't have a written plan, you'll have to figure everything out in the middle of the emergency. And that practically guarantees that you'll make mistakes, spend more money than you need to, and stay offline longer than you would like.

• Follow the 3-2-1 rule. Experts often recommend following the 3-2-1 rule for backups: have three copies of data, use two different types of storage, and store at least one of those copies off-site. For example, enterprises could follow this rule by creating one local backup and one cloud-based backup. That gives them three copies of the data (primary, local backup and cloud backup), two different types of storage (local and cloud) and one copy off-site in the public cloud.

• Test your plan. Disaster recovery plans are practically useless if they just sit in a file somewhere after they are written. In order to make sure that your plan will work, you need to test it under realistic conditions. That means creating conditions where you attempt to bring your systems online after a power and Internet outage. Obviously, you won't want to interrupt your production applications, but you should simulate your environment as closely as possible.

• Update your plan regularly. Your IT environment is changing all the time. You're adding new applications, new hardware and new staff. That means your disaster recovery plan needs to evolve as well. It's a good idea to schedule regular DR testing on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis and update your plan with what you learn during your tests.