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Business Storm Prep: Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist

BankUnited Nov 6, 2025

Learn how a strong disaster recovery plan helps safeguard your business.


Planning for the unexpected can help businesses weather any storm, whether it’s a minor flood, a hurricane, or a devastating fire. A strong disaster recovery plan doesn’t just protect your operations—it helps safeguard your employees, customers, and broader community.

Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity: What’s the Difference?

While a business continuity plan outlines how to keep operations running during and after a disruption, a disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring critical systems, data, and infrastructure. It’s your blueprint for getting back up and running.

Follow these four steps to develop and continuously improve a disaster recovery plan.

Step one: Prioritize what to protect 

Small- and medium-sized business owners and operators may be tempted to consider every piece of equipment, document, and piece of inventory to be essential. It’s an understandable impulse, but not especially helpful in developing a disaster recovery plan.

Some equipment and data are more important than others. Determine what is essential to keeping your operations running after disruption strikes. This exercise will look different for every company, but commonly prioritized data includes customer lists and payment information, financial records, and inventory orders. Depending on your business, critical intellectual property may also need to be maintained and protected.

Once you have identified data that must be safeguarded, develop and execute strategies to protect it. This can include:

  • Back up physical records by uploading to hard drives or the cloud.
  • Securely store digital copies of important documents like insurance policies, banking information, inventory, vendor contracts, and your office lease in the cloud.
  • Create paper duplicates of essential data to keep both on-site and off. 
  • Consider how employees will continue to work even if the physical office is destroyed or rendered unusable by a storm. This can include providing laptop computers and cloud-based software solutions to enable remote work.
All businesses today are at least partially digital. Which is why it’s important to develop an IT recovery plan as part of disaster recovery preparations. This will vary considerably depending on the IT resources your company has.


Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Detailed IT inventory IT Asset Recovery Plans Physical Equipment Protection
Identifies essential business functions and the IT resources needed to support them. Lists all services, devices, and software; provides visibility into assets and helps determine what to protect and restore. Covers how to protect and recover tech resources like data backups or storm-secure server rooms. Outlines steps to safeguard critical non-digital assets, such as relocating machinery or storing inventory offsite.

Step two: Develop a communication strategy

Employee safety is the top priority in any disaster recovery plan, and clear communication is the key to ensuring it. Your plan should include up-to-date contact information for all team members as well as a pre-set group email or text thread to quickly share updates about potential risks and operational pauses. Finally, it’s helpful to prepare sample messaging for your website or social media channels should normal business operations be impacted.

Step three: Prepare to recover financially and operationally 

Response time matters after a disaster strikes, and recovering quickly usually requires money. An effective disaster recovery plan anticipates the need for recovery capital.

  • Make sure your business has adequate insurance coverage: This can include specific coverage for floods or earthquakes, but also business interruption insurance that can replace lost income while your company is restarting.
  • Store copies of all your insurance documents in the cloud or in a separate physical location: Insurance claims can slow to a crawl when your business lacks the necessary documentation. 
  • Build a rainy-day fund to cover three to six months of business expenses and payroll: Work with your banker to determine how much money you should put away to navigate a business disruption and where that money should be saved. 
  • Identify grant programs intended for post-disaster help: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and a group of business partners developed a Readiness for Resiliency program that both helps small businesses prepare for storms and offers relief funding after disasters. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) also offers low-interest loans to support companies impacted by natural disasters. 

Step four: Test, train, and improve

It’s impossible to anticipate all the challenges a natural disaster will pose to a small business. But your company will be in a far better position to respond if you have a detailed disaster recovery plan that you have tested multiple times before a storm arrives. 

Practice will not only build the experience your employees need to execute the plan well but also identify gaps and areas for improvement. With a solid plan, the right tools, and a well-trained team, your business can rebound faster, stronger, and smarter than before.

First, educate your employees about the plan’s purpose and how/why it was developed. Tabletop exercises (like walking through a mock hurricane where the power goes out and key systems go offline) allow you to walk through emergency scenarios to identify gaps in planning, communication, and decision-making. Conducting this exercise in a low-pressure setting will help employees feel prepared and stay calm should anything happen. From there, build on the exercise and simulate real-time responses to other disaster incidents. 

Disasters may be unpredictable, but your response doesn't have to be. Taking time now to build, test, and refine your disaster recovery plan can make all the difference in how your business weathers the next major storm. 

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All content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or accounting advice. You should consult your legal and tax or accounting advisors before making any financial decisions. Outcomes may vary based on individual circumstances, financial condition, and market factors. Client stories or testimonials are not a guarantee, promise, or indication of future results.