A disaster recovery plan for an accounting firm should define what systems must be recovered, how quickly they need to be restored, how much data the firm can afford to lose, who is responsible for recovery, and how the plan will be tested.
For a 5 to 25 employee accounting firm, the plan does not need to be hundreds of pages long. It does need to answer practical questions before an outage occurs.
If your tax software becomes unavailable, how quickly must it be restored? If Microsoft 365 accounts are inaccessible, how will employees communicate? If a server fails, where is the data restored? If ransomware affects the environment, who makes the decision to invoke the recovery plan?
These decisions are much easier to make before an emergency than during one.
A useful disaster recovery plan should address at least seven areas:
- Critical systems and applications
- Recovery priorities
- Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)
- Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
- Backup and restoration procedures
- Roles and communication
- Testing and ongoing maintenance
For accounting firms, disaster recovery is not simply an IT exercise. It is part of maintaining the firm's ability to serve clients, protect deadlines, and continue operating when technology fails. Understanding the operational impact of downtime helps leadership determine how quickly critical systems need to be recovered.
Disaster Recovery Starts With the Business, Not the Backup
One of the most common mistakes organizations make is starting their disaster recovery planning with technology.
They ask:
Do we have backups?
Where are the backups stored?
How often do they run?
Those are important questions, but they come later.
The first question should be:
What does the business need in order to continue operating?
An accounting firm may depend on:
- Tax preparation software
- Microsoft 365
- Client document management
- Accounting applications
- Payroll systems
- File storage
- Internet connectivity
- Identity and authentication services
- Line-of-business applications
Not every system has the same importance.
If an archived document system is unavailable for a day, the impact may be manageable.
If employees cannot access tax software during a filing deadline, the impact could become significant within hours.
A disaster recovery plan should therefore begin by identifying critical business functions and determining which technology supports them.
1. Identify Your Critical Systems
Start by creating an inventory of the systems employees need to perform their work.
For each system, document:
- What the system does
- Who uses it
- Where it is hosted
- Who supports it
- What other systems it depends on
- What happens if it becomes unavailable
For example:
Tax software
Business impact: Tax preparation stops.
Microsoft 365
Business impact: Email, collaboration, and potentially access to cloud documents are disrupted.
Document management
Business impact: Employees may be unable to retrieve client records.
Identity services
Business impact: Employees may be unable to authenticate to otherwise functioning applications.
This exercise often reveals dependencies that are easy to overlook.
A server may be operational, for example, while an authentication, network, or Internet problem still prevents employees from accessing it.
A recovery plan should account for the entire chain required to deliver a business service.
2. Establish Recovery Priorities
Once critical systems are identified, determine the order in which they should be recovered.
Trying to restore everything simultaneously is rarely a useful strategy.
Instead, create recovery tiers.
Tier 1: Business Critical
Systems required to perform essential client work.
Examples might include:
- Identity and authentication
- Internet connectivity
- Tax applications
- Critical file storage
- Client document systems
Tier 2: Operationally Important
Systems employees need but that may tolerate a somewhat longer interruption.
Tier 3: Noncritical
Systems that can remain unavailable while higher-priority services are restored.
The exact classification will vary by firm.
The important point is that recovery priorities should be determined by business requirements before an outage occurs.
Otherwise, technical teams may spend valuable recovery time restoring the easiest system instead of the most important one.
3. Define RTO and RPO for Critical Systems
Two of the most important numbers in a disaster recovery plan are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Recovery Time Objective
RTO answers:
How long can this system be unavailable?
A firm might determine:
- Client document system: 1 hour
- Tax software: 2 hours
- Email: 4 hours
- Internal administrative application: 8 hours
These are examples, not universal recommendations. Each firm should establish objectives based on its own operational requirements.
Recovery Point Objective
RPO answers:
How much data can we afford to lose?
Suppose a system is backed up every four hours.
If a failure occurs immediately before the next backup, as much as four hours of work could potentially need to be recreated.
For some applications, that may be acceptable.
For others, it may not be.
This is why saying "we have backups" does not fully answer the recovery question.
The backup strategy must support the recovery objectives of the business.
4. Document How Systems Will Actually Be Recovered
A disaster recovery plan needs more than a list of applications.
It should explain what happens when something fails.
For critical systems, document questions such as:
- Where are backups stored?
- How frequently are they created?
- Are backup copies isolated from the production environment?
- How is a restoration initiated?
- Where will systems be restored?
- What credentials are required?
- Who has access to those credentials?
- Which vendors need to be contacted?
- What dependencies must be restored first?
- How will the restored system be validated?
This documentation becomes especially important during stressful situations.
The person who normally manages a system may be unavailable.
A vendor may need information quickly.
Credentials may not be readily accessible.
Recovery procedures should not depend entirely on one person's memory.
5. Plan for More Than Server Failure
Disaster recovery planning should consider multiple failure scenarios.
A server failure is only one possibility.
An accounting firm could also experience:
Ransomware
Systems may technically still exist but cannot safely be used.
Internet outage
Cloud applications may be operational while employees cannot reach them.
Microsoft 365 disruption
Email and collaboration capabilities may become temporarily unavailable.
Identity failure
Applications may be functioning while users cannot authenticate. Strong identity and authentication practices can reduce certain access-related risks, but recovery planning should still account for situations where identity services become unavailable.
Hardware failure
A firewall, storage device, server, or other critical component may fail.
Facility outage
Employees may need to work from another location.
Vendor outage
A critical third-party application may become unavailable even though the firm's own infrastructure is functioning normally.
Each scenario can require a different response.
A mature disaster recovery plan considers how the business will respond to multiple types of interruption rather than assuming every incident will look the same.
6. Define Roles and Communication Before an Incident
Technical recovery is only one part of managing an outage.
Someone also needs to coordinate the response.
The disaster recovery plan should identify responsibilities such as:
- Who declares a disaster?
- Who coordinates technical recovery?
- Who contacts technology vendors?
- Who communicates with employees?
- Who communicates with clients when necessary?
- Who determines business priorities?
- Who provides status updates to leadership?
For a smaller accounting firm, one person may fill several of these roles.
That's fine.
The important thing is that the responsibility is defined.
Communication procedures should also account for the possibility that normal communication systems are unavailable.
If Microsoft 365 is part of the outage, for example, relying exclusively on email to coordinate recovery creates another problem.
Alternative communication methods should be documented in advance.
7. Test the Plan Before You Need It
A disaster recovery plan that has never been tested is still largely theoretical.
Backups can complete successfully while restorations fail.
Documentation can become outdated.
Passwords change.
Applications move.
Employees leave.
Vendors change procedures.
Infrastructure evolves.
Testing helps identify these problems before an actual emergency.
At minimum, firms should periodically validate:
- Backup completion
- Backup integrity
- File restoration
- System restoration procedures
- Recovery documentation
- Vendor contact information
- Administrative credentials
- RTO and RPO assumptions
More comprehensive recovery exercises can simulate the loss of a critical system and walk through the organization's response.
The objective is not simply to prove that a backup exists.
The objective is to answer:
Can we restore the business service within the time the business requires?
A Backup Is Not a Disaster Recovery Plan
This distinction is important.
A backup is a copy of data.
Disaster recovery is the process for restoring technology.
An accounting firm can therefore have successful backups and still have an inadequate recovery strategy.
For example, imagine that all client data is safely backed up.
That's good.
But if restoring the environment takes three days during a critical filing period, the firm still has a serious operational problem.
Recovery planning connects backup technology with business expectations.
Disaster Recovery Should Change as the Firm Changes
A recovery plan should not be created once and placed on a shelf.
Technology environments change continuously.
Accounting firms add employees.
Applications move to the cloud.
Servers are replaced.
Security requirements change.
New vendors are introduced.
Old systems are retired.
A disaster recovery plan should evolve with those changes.
Major technology projects should trigger a review of recovery procedures, and the overall plan should be reviewed periodically to confirm that priorities, contacts, documentation, and recovery assumptions remain accurate.
This is one reason disaster recovery works best when it is integrated into ongoing technology operations rather than treated as a separate annual project.
Disaster Recovery Is Part of Production Readiness
At Everleap IT, we view disaster recovery as one component of a broader operational strategy.
A Production Ready technology environment considers:
- Infrastructure health
- Capacity
- Monitoring
- Recovery readiness
- Documentation
- Security
- Strategic planning
Recovery planning supports that model by asking an important question:
If something fails tomorrow, are we prepared to restore the systems the business depends on?
The goal is not to eliminate every possible technology failure.
That is unrealistic.
The goal is to reduce preventable failures, detect problems quickly, recover predictably, and minimize the impact on business operations.
How Everleap IT Approaches Disaster Recovery
Our approach to technology operations has been shaped by more than 20 years of managing production hosting environments, where availability, monitoring, documentation, recovery, and operational discipline are everyday requirements.
For accounting firms, we apply the same operational mindset to areas such as:
- Backup verification
- Recovery planning
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Hardware lifecycle management
- Microsoft 365
- Identity security
- Documentation
- Strategic technology planning
- Production Readiness
The specific recovery strategy should reflect the firm's applications, infrastructure, business priorities, and acceptable level of operational risk.
There is no single disaster recovery template that is right for every accounting firm.
There should, however, be a documented and tested plan.
Is Your Accounting Firm Ready to Recover?
The best time to answer that question is before an outage.
Start with seven areas:
Critical systems. Recovery priorities. RTO. RPO. Recovery procedures. Responsibilities. Testing.
If any of those are unknown, your firm may have a recovery gap worth addressing.
Everleap IT helps accounting firms throughout California's Inland Empire, including Rancho Cucamonga, Upland, Chino, and nearby communities, build more resilient technology environments through proactive monitoring, backup verification, disaster recovery planning, business continuity, strategic planning, and Production Readiness assessments.
If you'd like to understand how prepared your current technology environment is for a significant outage, a technology assessment can help identify recovery gaps and opportunities to improve resilience before an emergency occurs. Feel free to connect with us anytime to discuss your tech setup and book an assessment
