An IT disaster recovery plan, often shortened to DRP, is a documented set of steps your business follows to restore IT systems, data and infrastructure after a serious disruption.

It tells your team what to do if you are hit by ransomware, a server failure, accidental data loss, a cloud outage, hardware failure or another incident that stops critical systems from working.

In simple terms, a disaster recovery plan is your IT recovery playbook. It helps you get systems back online quickly, reduce data loss, limit downtime and keep the business moving.

This guide explains what a DRP is, when to use one, […]

It usually starts small. Someone uses an AI tool to refine a difficult email. Someone enables an AI add-on inside a SaaS app because it promises to save an hour a week. Someone pastes a paragraph into a chatbot to “make it sound better.”

Then it becomes routine.

And once it’s routine, it stops being a simple tool decision and becomes a data governance issue: what’s being shared, where it’s going, and whether you could prove what happened if something goes wrong.

That’s the core of shadow AI security.

Ransomware isn’t a jump scare. It’s a slow build.

In many cases, it begins days, or even weeks, before encryption, with something mundane, like a login that never should have succeeded.

That’s why an effective ransomware defense plan is about more than deploying anti-malware. It’s about preventing unauthorised access from gaining traction.

Here’s a five-step approach you can implement across your small-business environment without turning security into a daily obstacle course.

Why Ransomware Is Harder to Stop Once It Starts