If a natural disaster or cyberattack were to happen to your organization today, how quickly could you recover? If the answer isn’t “within hours,” your nonprofit organization should consider developing a disaster recovery plan.
Opengear research from September 2025 shows that 84% of CIOs and CSOs reported an increase in network outages in the last two years. More than a third of these organizations lost between $1 million and $5 million in the previous year alone from these outages.
When checking if your website is being affected by an outage, the internet features several tools that will send test traffic to your site to show if it’s down for you or everybody.
Business continuity is critical when facing network or power outages, system failures, natural disasters, accidents, cyberattacks, and software updates. Hopefully, your organization never experiences a disaster, but now is the time to prepare.
Full-Proofing Your Disaster Recovery Plan
When it comes to disaster recovery plans, the benefits of the cloud are indisputable. Implementing a cloud disaster recovery plan is a simple way to ensure your organization is protected in the event of a disaster. When your organization hosts its data in the cloud, it resides on multiple, off-site virtual servers with overlapping backups of your data, so you never risk losing any information.
Cloud technology is becoming increasingly commonplace in nonprofits across the U.S. According to our 2024 Nonprofit Trends Report, in 2023, 4 out of 5 nonprofits said they are more likely to adopt a cloud-based solution, compared to over two years ago, with 1 in 3 saying they are much more likely.
The report also showed that, on average, those who transitioned to cloud solutions say they’ve gained 2 days a week by eliminating manual work and redundancies. Additionally, more than 90% of respondents said that moving their systems to the cloud has had a positive impact on their organization.
Cloud Disaster Recovery vs. Traditional Disaster Recovery
Developing a cloud disaster recovery plan has several benefits over traditional recovery plans, as traditional plans often rely on on-premise resources and tend to be complex and expensive.
Traditional disaster recovery plans are:
- Highly complex: Traditional recovery plans rely on local data recovery sites and can be challenging to manage and monitor.
- Costly: Setting up and maintaining a local site can be time-consuming and expensive.
- Less scalable: Traditional plans require additional servers to expand capacity, whereas cloud servers already have the necessary infrastructure in place.
Cloud disaster recovery plans are a more affordable and less complex solution.
Often, cloud providers offer these plans as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that can scale to meet your organization’s unique needs. The cloud helps your organization recover its critical systems after a disaster and provides remote access to your systems in a secure, virtual environment.
Other advantages of cloud-based disaster recovery plans include:
- No internal infrastructure: Because your organization’s data is on cloud servers, you do not need to buy expensive internal infrastructure.
- Scalability: Cloud resources can be quickly scaled up or down in response to demand.
- ROI: Besides saving money on equipment, cloud vendors offer flexible pricing models.
- Quick disaster recovery: Cloud disaster recovery plans enable your organization to restore its data in minutes from any location, ensuring rapid recovery.
- No single point of failure: The cloud lets you store backup data across redundant, off-site servers in multiple geographical locations.
- Network infrastructure: Cloud vendors continuously work to improve and secure their infrastructure, provide support and maintenance, and release updates.
- Compliance: If your organization is legally required to comply with industry or governmental regulatory requirements—like GDPR, PCI, SOC 2, or others—cloud disaster recovery plans can help you stay compliant without hiring in-house experts. Reputable cloud providers ensure compliance with whatever controls you require.
Minimizing Downtime and Preventing Data Loss
Downtime is a byproduct of power outages, system failures, natural disasters, accidents, cyber-attacks, and software updates. During these periods, your organization’s data is unavailable and inaccessible. In the case of cyberattacks, unauthorized parties can also hold your data hostage.
The best cloud providers offer data encryption, regular data back-ups, and routine software updates to get ahead of malware and keep your organization secure from cyberattacks.
Cloud disaster recovery plans also protect against human errors. If something happens to your data due to a harmless mistake, your organization can quickly restore it, provided you have an internet connection.
Cloud systems prevent downtime, allowing your organization more time to accomplish the work that fulfills its mission.
Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan
If your organization doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan or hasn’t updated its plan in some time, these three steps will help you create a complete disaster recovery plan.
1. Analyze
Your organization should complete a comprehensive risk assessment and impact analysis of your existing IT infrastructure and workloads in the context of a natural disaster or power outage.
During this analysis, you’ll evaluate how your current infrastructure stands against these challenges and determine your workload’s recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
2. Collaborate and Create
In this step, you’ll determine the steps your organization will take in the event of a natural disaster. Essential things your organization should consider:
- Appointing a point person to execute the plan in the event of a disaster
- Identifying a rendezvous point for members of your office
- Any important authentication documents, like passwords, financial information, and legal documents
- If you’re using a cloud disaster recovery plan, include your cloud vendor’s contact information
Ready.gov, a website created by the Department of Homeland Security, includes several other aspects for your organization to consider when developing its plan.
3. Prevent
Your organization should discuss potential threats and vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. You can also practice responding to a disaster plan so that your staff remains current with their preparations. Finally, consider reaching out to your cloud provider to learn how they’ll react in the event of a natural disaster.
Plan Today, Execute When Needed
Hopefully, your organization will never need to use its disaster recovery plan. However, by preparing one today, you will have it ready if needed. Cloud disaster recovery plans are flexible and easily enable business continuity in the event of a disaster or potential data loss.
