Disaster recovery plays a major role in IT consulting. Most businesses understand that business downtime is costly, but not all of them know how to create and execute a disaster recovery strategy.

Technology is just one aspect of disaster recovery. It’s great if you back your data up in the cloud, but you also need to know how to recover it. Even if you practice data backup, you can fail at disaster recovery if you didn’t train your employees. According to a recent Tech Republic article, you should establish a communication protocol to keep employees informed in the case of a disaster:

“Working directly with your IT staff on disaster communication protocol goes hand in hand with the rule set of the communication tree. In a disaster, staff has a tendency to be nervous, so it’s natural for a staffer in the accounting department to just call a junior staff member in IT networking he has lunch with to “get the latest.” This is where rumors start that can be damaging to the company, both internally and externally.” Here are three things you can do to establish a communication protocol:

Create a strategy:

It all starts with your disaster recovery strategy. In your plan, you need to outline how exactly employees will communicate with management. Train employees Once your strategy is finished, you can start training employees. The important thing is that each individual knows what he or she is supposed to do.

Follow up

After you train employees, you should follow up with them from time to time. If you don’t, then employees will just forget what they learned during training. By mentioning disaster recovery from time to time, you’ll make sure that employees remember their training. This way, they’ll know what to do when disaster strikes.