Disasters for Small Teams

This post is a short guide to disaster planning and recovery for organizations whose “IT department” fits around a single table, such as a small company or a research software team. The recommendations assume you are doing everything yourself, on top of your day job, and that a single person’s absence can leave a critical gap. The goal is not a perfect plan. The goal is a plan that works well enough for you to survive the worst day of your team’s existence, written by people who have a dozen other things to do. Keep it short, keep it tested, and keep it alive. Risk Assessment and Impact Analysis Make a simple list of every service your team depends on to function: source control (GitHub/GitLab), email, chat, CI/CD, your production application, your database, your domain registrar, your cloud provider, and the laptops your team codes on. If you are a research team, add your data repository, your grant-management portal, and any shared lab instrument controllers. For each service,…