Disaster recovery is the practice of anticipating, planning for, surviving, and recovering from a disaster that may affect a business. Disasters can include:
With over 20 years of storage industry experience in a variety of companies including Xsigo Systems and OnStor, and with an MBA in Mechanical Engineering, Jon Toor is an expert and innovator in the ever growing storage space.
Prioritize application dependencies: Map out application interdependencies. Knowing which applications rely on others helps ensure that critical apps are brought online in the correct sequence during disaster recovery, avoiding bottlenecks and delays.
Incorporate advanced threat detection in your DR plan: Integrate cybersecurity monitoring tools that detect threats during the disaster recovery process. This ensures that the restored environment is not compromised by latent threats that may have caused the disaster in the first place.
Leverage immutable backups: Use immutable backups, especially to safeguard against ransomware attacks. These backups cannot be altered or deleted within a specified time frame, ensuring a clean recovery point.
Implement geodiverse backups: Instead of relying on one geographic location, replicate your backups across multiple regions to ensure data availability even in the event of a regional disaster like earthquakes or hurricanes.
Encrypt backups at rest and in transit: Ensure backups are encrypted both at rest and while being transmitted to your disaster recovery site. This adds an extra layer of protection.
A disaster recovery plan enables businesses to respond quickly to a disaster and take immediate action to reduce damage, and resume operations as quickly as possible.
A disaster recovery plan typically includes:
Drafting a disaster recovery plan , and ensuring you have the right staff in place to carry it out, can have the following benefits:
Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are often grouped into one corporate identity called BCDR. However, while the two share similar objectives that help improve the organization’s resiliency, business continuity and disaster recovery differ in scope.
Business continuity is a proactive approach to minimizing risks and ensuring the organization can continue to deliver products and services regardless of the circumstances. BC primarily focuses on defining ways to ensure employees can continue their work and enable the business to continue operations during disaster events.
Disaster recovery is a subset of BC focused mainly on the IT systems required for business continuity. DR defines specific steps needed to resume technology operations after an event occurs. It is a reactive process that requires planning, but organizations implement DR only when a disaster truly occurs.
Here are four things you must include in your disaster recovery plan and process, to ensure your business continuity.
Learn about the history of your business, the industry and the region, and map out the threats you are most likely to face. These should include natural disasters, geopolitical events like wars or civil unrest, failure to critical equipment like servers, Internet connections or software, and cyber attacks that are most likely to affect your type of business.
Ensure your disaster recovery plan is effective against all, or at least the most likely or most significant threats. If necessary, develop separate DR plans or separate sections within your DR plan for specific types of disasters.
It’s important to be comprehensive. Get your team together and make a big list of all the assets that are important for the day-to-day operations of your business. In the IT sphere this includes network equipment, servers, workstations, software, cloud services, mobile devices, and more. Once you have your list organize it into:
Define your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for critical assets. What period of downtime can you sustain? For example, a high traffic eCommerce site sustains major financial damage for every minute of downtime. An accounting firm may be able to sustain a day or two of downtime and resume normal operations, provided there is no data loss. Build a process and obtain technological means that can help you bring operations back online within the RTO.
The term recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum age of files the organization must recover from backup storage to resume normal operations after a disaster occurs. Organizations use RPO to determine the minimum frequency of backups. For example, a four-hour RPO requires backing up at least every four hours.
A cornerstone of almost every disaster recovery plan is having a way to replicate data between multiple disaster recovery sites. While many businesses schedule periodic data backups, for disaster recovery purposes, the preferred approach is to continuously replicate data to another system. Data may be replicated to:
Local storage is less resilient to disaster but gives you a shorter RTO. It also allows you to replicate or backup data more frequently, improving your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – meaning you can restore your data from almost every point in time.
Just like business systems can fail in a disaster, so can backups. There are many horror stories of organizations that had a backup system in place, but discovered too late that backups were not actually working properly. A configuration problem, software error or equipment failure can render your backups useless, and you may never know it unless you test them.
An inseparable part of any disaster recovery plan is to test that data is being replicated correctly to the target location. It’s just as important to test that it’s possible to restore data back to your production site. These tests must be conducted once, when you set up your disaster recovery apparatus, and repeated periodically to ensure the setup is still working.
Here are key steps to help guide you through the process of creating a disaster recovery plan:
A disaster recovery plan should start with business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment that address the relevant potential disasters. Here are key aspects of considerations:
Once you have completed a risk assessment, you need to evaluate the critical needs of each department and establish priorities for operations and processing. It involves creating written agreements for predetermined alternatives and specifying the following details:
Here are key aspects to help you set disaster recovery plan objectives:
Data helps create informed and relevant disaster recovery plans. Here are key data types to collect at this stage:
Organize and include this data in a written, documented plan.
A disaster recovery plan should remain theoretical – you need to regularly test and revise the plan to ensure it remains relevant. Testing can help obtain the following benefits:
Here are several types of disaster recovery plan tests you can employ:
Before running the test, you should determine the criteria and procedures for testing your disaster recovery plan. After choosing a test, you should conduct a structured walk-through test or an initial dry run and correct any issues. Ideally, you should run this run dry outside normal business hours to avoid disrupting work.
Organizations may choose various DR strategies according to the infrastructure and assets they wish to protect and the backup and recovery methods they use. The scale and vision of an organization’s DR plan may require specific teams for departments like networking or data centers. Here are some examples of DR solutions:
Data centers are the backbone of modern businesses, housing critical IT infrastructure, applications, and data. When a disaster impacts a data center, the consequences can be severe, leading to significant downtime, data loss, and financial losses. Implementing a comprehensive data center disaster recovery plan is essential to ensure the continuity of business operations and minimize the impact of such events.
A data center disaster recovery plan typically includes several components to ensure the quick and efficient recovery of data and systems. These components may include:
Testing and maintenance: Regularly testing the disaster recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness and updating it as needed to address changes in the business environment.
Network disaster recovery focuses on the restoration of an organization’s network infrastructure, ensuring that critical systems and applications remain accessible during and after a disaster. This type of recovery is essential for maintaining communication, collaboration, and data exchange between employees, customers, and partners.
Effective network disaster recovery planning involves several key elements, including:
Regular testing and monitoring: Continuously monitoring network performance and conducting regular tests to identify potential issues and assess the effectiveness of the disaster recovery plan.
Cloud disaster recovery, also known as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a modern approach to protecting your organization’s data and applications by leveraging cloud-based resources. This type of disaster recovery offers several benefits, including:
Implementing a cloud disaster recovery plan involves several steps, such as:
Testing and monitoring: Regularly test the cloud disaster recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness and monitor the cloud environment to detect potential issues.
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Virtualized disaster recovery leverages virtualization technology to replicate and recover entire systems, including operating systems, applications, and data, on virtual machines (VMs). This approach offers several advantages, such as:
To implement a virtualized disaster recovery plan, you should:
Monitor and maintain the virtual environment: Continuously monitor the virtual environment to detect potential issues and perform regular maintenance to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
Do you need to backup data to on-premises storage, as part of your disaster recovery setup? Cloudian offers a low-cost disk-based storage technology that lets you backup data locally with a capacity of up to 1.5 Petabytes. You can also set up a Cloudian appliance in a remote site and use our integrated data management tools to save data there.
Another deployment option is a hybrid cloud configuration. You can backup data to a local Cloudian appliance, then replicate to the cloud for DR purposes. This combines the low latency of local storage with the resilience of the cloud.
Learn more about Cloudian’s data protection solutions.
Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of information security .
Authored by Cynet
Authored by Exabeam
