How to Build an Effective SOC 2 Disaster Recovery Plan

Did you know that infrastructure failures can cost a staggering $100,000 per hour? And that’s not even the worst part—critical application failures can rack up costs between $500,000 and $1 million per hour!

Most SMBs can’t bounce back from such massive losses. This is one of the reasons why organizations take their disaster recovery plans very seriously. 

And often, they also find it easier to align with cornerstone frameworks like SOC 2, which comes to the rescue. 

The SOC 2 recovery plan explicitly requires organizations to maintain up-to-date client data backups, implement multiple failsafes, and even leverage servers in remote locations.

Essentially, a SOC 2 disaster recovery plan is a crucial policy that ensures business continuity and data security when disaster strikes. In this post, we break down the plan and the common elements required to ensure its successful implementation. 

What is the SOC 2 Disaster Recovery Plan?

Annex A of a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) plays a crucial role in achieving and maintaining SOC 2 compliance, particularly in ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of systems and data. 

The instructions and procedures are designed to help an organization recover and protect its IT infrastructure and critical operations from natural disasters or unexpected disruptions. 

In the context of SOC 2, Annex A isn’t just important—it’s crucial. Because it ensures you have the security controls needed to safeguard the common criteria like confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and data.

Section A1.2 & A1.3: What is it?

Annex A of a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) under SOC 2 is designed to detail the exact actions a service organization needs to take to bounce back from a disaster. It’s established in such a way that is straightforward, brief, and practical, giving a step-by-step guide that can be followed immediately when disasters occur. Now, what do these two sections specify exactly? Let’s take a look.

A1.2: Builds the foundation for security

Section A1.2 of SOC 2 focuses on creating a solid foundation for your IT environment. This means your company must authorize, design, develop, acquire, implement, operate, approve, maintain, and monitor environmental protections, software, data backup processes, and recovery infrastructure to meet its objectives.

Essentially, this section ensures you have all the necessary safeguards in place to protect your data and maintain seamless operations.

A1.3: Perfecting the recovery process

Section A1.3 is focused on ensuring you’re well prepared for any adverse incident. This section requires your organization to test its recovery plan procedures to guarantee system recovery objectives are met.

Regular testing of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) plan is crucial, as is frequently testing your backup data to ensure it’s recoverable.

You need to be confident that your recovery plan works when it counts. Whether you’re dealing with traditional tape backups or a modern cloud environment, these tests ensure your data recovery processes are reliable and effective.

Common Elements of SOC 2 Disaster Recovery Planning

Here are the common elements of a disaster recovery plan:

1. Assess IT inventory

Creating a list of assets might be tedious, but it gives you a clear understanding of your business systems. The inventory needs to be regularly updated when assets are added, removed, or changed. Use this process to get rid of unnecessary data.

The steps of the assessment include:

• Listing all your assets
• Determining the importance and role of each asset
• Conducting a risk assessment
• Defining your recovery goals
• Choosing a disaster recovery plan
• Budgeting your plan
• Test and review the plan

Your IT provider typically handles this process. Depending on your company’s size and business complexity, the assessment might take some time.

2. Understand the scope

A DRP can be simple or detailed. It should include:

• Identifying critical IT systems and networks.
• Prioritizing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
• Outlining steps to restart, reconfigure, and recover systems and networks.

Decide if your DRP covers cyber-attacks, natural disasters, or both. Ideally, it should cover both, and this needs to be documented.

3. Backup Management Strategy

Your disaster recovery plan should include having dispensable servers ready in case of a massive power outage to the data center. Remember, backups alone don’t ensure business continuity—a recovery plan without backups is useless.

For cost-effective disaster recovery, consider migrating to the cloud instead of maintaining physical off-site data centers.

4. Roles and Responsibilities

Ultimately, for efficient disaster recovery, your organization must have a disaster recovery team that is well-informed of the documented disaster recovery plan and his/ her roles therein. The identification of roles and responsibilities of the team involves action before a disaster, during a disaster, and after a disaster, ensure that:

• Multiple people know how to perform essential tasks, so any single member is unlikely to fail or make a mistake.
• Contact details of all the key personnel in a team with the external stakeholders or suppliers.
• Routine backup of important files and data and guaranteeing that the backup files are viable.
• Staff know how to perform certain processes manually if software or hardware is damaged or disrupted.
• Check on members regularly and conduct simulation exercises for the disaster recovery team so that everyone stays fluent in the operations.
• A clear communication strategy must be in place, in consultation with human resources, to ensure that all employees understand their responsibilities and the measures to prevent reputational damage.

5. Critical Business Function Processes

For each critical business function (CBF), you should document the following:

Preventative/Recovery Actions:

• Detail the procedures necessary to back up or restore the company’s CBF.
• Describe best practices for avoiding potential disruptions in places where essential work will take place; this includes operations, preventive maintenance, updates, recovery work, and additional recovery activities.
• Outline the steps taken to arrive at a solution in case of a system breakdown to return the system to its full effectiveness.

Resources/Equipment Required:

• List all necessary resources, such as hardware, software, and network components, needed for backup and restoration.
• Identify essential external resources or services, like cloud storage or third-party vendors.
• Ensure you have access to backup copies of critical data and software.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO):

• Determine the maximum time the CBF can be OFF before it starts adversely affecting the company’s operations.
• The RTO or recovery point objectives should be utilized in each recovery activity’s time frames and attainable during security incidents.
• Always monitor and evaluate the recovery processes as they face new challenges and threats in a business environment.

Responsibility:

Assign specific individuals or teams responsible for carrying out each preventative and recovery action related to a security incident.

6. Additional Considerations:

• Dependencies: Identify the CBF’s dependencies on other functions, systems, or external partners and make them accountable for the recovery plan.
• Testing and Validation: Regularly test the documented recovery actions to ensure they are effective and can be executed as planned.
• Communication Plan: Develop a communication strategy to keep all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and partners, informed during the recovery process.
• Documentation Updates: Keep the documentation updated with any changes in processes, resources, or personnel.
• Review and Improvement: Periodically review the recovery documentation and improve based on lessons learned from tests or actual incidents.

SOC 2 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Requirements

At Sprinto, a disaster recovery plan assumes that the following requirements are met:

Critical Data Backups

You must ensure that critical data backups are available as detailed in your Data Backup Policy. For example, regularly update and securely store backups of your customer databases and financial records. These backups are readily accessible, allowing you to restore data quickly in case of a financial loss or breach.

Multi-Region Infrastructure Support

Next, your infrastructure providers offer multi-region support, meaning they have data centers in various locations worldwide.

For instance, if a natural disaster impacts our primary data center in North America, you can switch to a backup center in Europe or Asia. This will ensure continuous service availability and minimize downtime.

Independent Customer/Partner Recovery Plans

Their business continuity and disaster recovery plans manage incidents affecting your customers or partners but not your systems.

For example, suppose a partner’s server goes down, but your critical systems remain functional. In that case, they will execute their recovery plan to restore their operations to minimize any impact on collaboration. 

How Can Sprinto Help in the SOC 2 Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster recovery planning is only effective if the plans are tested regularly and everyone knows their role when adverse incidents occur. To ensure this, your IT provider and key internal stakeholders should perform a tabletop testing exercise at least once a year. 

This ensures that disaster recovery processes work as expected and that everyone knows what to do during an IT disaster. At Sprinto, we have a ready-made disaster recovery template available. All you need to do is customize it according to your requirements, and you’ll have a plan in place. Sprinto also helps with:

• Ensures that critical systems like antivirus, firewalls, and backup solutions are installed and functioning correctly.
• Provides predefined templates and policies to help organizations establish and maintain best practices and compliance with regulations
• Evaluates potential risks and their impact on the organization
• Provides access to SOC 2 training modules and ongoing support to keep you ahead of compliance requirements.

With the help of continuous control monitoring, you will have a 360 degree view of failing checks and get notified to address it.

Experience the power of Sprinto by booking a demo today, and let us answer any queries you may have.

FAQs

What Is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a detailed strategy and set of systems designed to prevent and recover from potential threats like natural disasters or cyber-attacks. It ensures a company can quickly resume operations after a significant disruption.

How Does SOC 2 Address the Availability of Systems and the Need for a Business Continuity Strategy?

SOC 2 emphasizes system availability by implementing controls that underscore the necessity of a business continuity strategy. This way, auditors evaluate how a company can handle unexpected situations so that its business continuity and disaster recovery plans mitigate risks to system availability, whether from cyber threats or natural disasters.

Why Is a Disaster Recovery Plan Important for SOC 2 Compliance?

A business continuity plan is crucial for SOC 2 compliance because it’s part of the documentation auditors review. They assess your systems, security controls, and this plan to gauge your compliance with chosen Trust Services Criteria. The plan becomes even more critical if Availability is a TSC in your audit. SOC 2’s Availability controls aim to reduce downtime, making thorough risk assessment essential.

What is Disaster Recovery Audit?

A disaster recovery audit, also known as an IT audit, involves gathering and assessing information about a business’s information systems, procedures, practices, operations, and governance.