Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is an organization’s ability to restore access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster event, whether natural or caused by human action (or error). DR is considered a subset of business continuity, explicitly focusing on ensuring that the IT systems that support critical business functions are operational as soon as possible after a disruptive event occurs.
Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial for any business, especially those operating either partially or entirely in the cloud. Disasters that interrupt service and cause data loss can happen anytime without warning—your network could have an outage, a critical bug could get released, or your business might have to weather a natural disaster. Organizations with robust and well-tested disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and resume core operations rapidly when things go awry.
IT disaster recovery
IT disaster recovery is a portfolio of policies, tools, and processes used to recover or continue operations of critical IT infrastructure, software, and systems after a natural or human-made disaster. The first and foremost aspect of a disaster recovery plan is cloud. The cloud is considered the best solution for both business continuity and disaster recovery. The cloud eliminates the need to run a separate disaster recovery data center (or recovery site).
What is considered a disaster?
Disaster Recovery planning and strategies focus on responding to and recovering from disasters—events that disrupt or completely stop a business from operating.
While these events can be natural disasters like a hurricane, they can also be caused by a severe system failure, an intentional attack, or even human error.
Types of disasters can include:
- Natural disasters (for example, earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, or wildfires)
- Pandemics and epidemics
- Cyber attacks (for example, malware, DDoS, and ransomware attacks)
- Other intentional, human-caused threats such as terrorist or biochemical attacks
- Technological hazards (for example, power outages, pipeline explosions, and transportation accidents)
- Machine and hardware failure
Importance of disaster recovery
Technology plays an increasingly important role in every aspect of business, with applications and services enabling companies to be more agile, available, and connected. This trend has contributed to the widespread adoption of cloud computing by organizations to drive growth, innovation, and exceptional customer experience.
However, the migration to cloud environments public, private, hybrid, or multicloud and the rise of remote workforces are introducing more infrastructure complexity and potential risks. Disaster recovery for cloud-based systems is critical to an overall business continuity strategy. A system breakdown or unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for enterprises that rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep things running smoothly.
In addition, data privacy laws and standards stipulate that most organizations are now required to have a disaster recovery strategy. Failure to follow Disaster recovery plans can result in compliance violations and steep regulatory fines.
Every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event that stops day-to-day operations, no matter what industry or size. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage that can lead to lost customers and revenue.
How disaster recovery works
Disaster recovery (DR) is essential for ensuring that critical applications and infrastructure can be restored quickly after an outage—ideally within minutes. An effective DR plan addresses three key elements to ensure a swift recovery:
1. Preventive Measures: These focus on securing and stabilizing systems to prevent disasters from occurring. This includes regularly backing up critical data and continuously monitoring environments for configuration errors and compliance violations to identify potential issues before they escalate.
2. Detective Measures: To enable rapid recovery, it’s crucial to detect when a response is needed. Detective measures involve real-time monitoring and detection of unwanted events, such as system failures or security breaches, allowing for immediate action.
3. Corrective Measures: These involve planning for potential DR scenarios, ensuring that backup operations are in place to minimize impact, and implementing recovery procedures to quickly restore data and systems when necessary. Corrective measures are crucial for executing the DR plan effectively during an actual disaster.
A typical disaster recovery strategy includes securely replicating and backing up critical data and workloads to a secondary location or multiple disaster recovery sites. These sites can be used to restore data from the most recent backup or from an earlier point in time, depending on the situation. If an unforeseen event causes the primary location and its systems to fail, organizations can switch operations to the DR site until the primary systems are restored, ensuring business continuity.
Types of disaster recovery
The types of disaster recovery you’ll need will depend on your IT infrastructure, the type of backup and recovery you use, and the assets you need to protect.
Here are some of the most common technologies and techniques used in disaster recovery:
Backups: Traditional backups involve saving data to an offsite system or physically transporting an external drive to a secure location. While essential for data protection, backups alone do not include the infrastructure needed to fully restore IT operations, so they are not a comprehensive disaster recovery solution.
Backup as a Service (BaaS): BaaS provides regular data backups managed by a third-party provider, similar to remote data backups. This service ensures that data is securely stored offsite, but it may not encompass all IT infrastructure components required for a complete disaster recovery.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): DRaaS is offered by many cloud providers alongside other cloud service models like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). DRaaS allows you to back up both data and IT infrastructure, hosting them on a third-party provider’s cloud infrastructure. In the event of a disaster, the provider executes your DR plan, restoring access and functionality with minimal disruption to your operations.
Point-in-Time Snapshots: Also known as point-in-time copies, snapshots create replicas of data, files, or entire databases at specific moments. These snapshots can be used to restore data if they are stored in a location unaffected by the disaster. However, there may be some data loss depending on the timing of the snapshot.
Virtual Disaster Recovery (Virtual DR): Virtual DR solutions enable you to back up operations and data or create a complete replica of your IT infrastructure on offsite virtual machines (VMs). In the event of a disaster, you can quickly reload your backup and resume operations. This solution requires regular data and workload transfers to ensure that the backup remains current.
Disaster Recovery Sites: These sites serve as temporary locations for organizations to operate from after a disaster. They house backups of data, systems, and other essential technology infrastructure, enabling a swift transition and continuity of business operations during recovery efforts.
Benefits of disaster recovery
Stronger business continuity
Every second counts when your business goes offline, impacting productivity, customer experience, and your company’s reputation. Disaster recovery helps safeguard critical business operations by ensuring they can recover with minimal or no interruption.
Enhanced security
DR plans use data backup and other procedures that strengthen your security posture and limit the impact of attacks and other security risks. For example, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer built-in security capabilities, such as advanced encryption, identity and access management, and organizational policy.
Faster recovery
Disaster recovery solutions make restoring your data and workloads easier so you can get business operations back online quickly after a catastrophic event. DR plans leverage data replication and often rely on automated recovery to minimize downtime and data loss.
Reduced recovery costs
The monetary impacts of a disaster event can be significant, ranging from loss of business and productivity to data privacy penalties to ransoms. With disaster recovery, you can avoid, or at least minimize, some of these costs. Cloud DR processes can also reduce the operating costs of running and maintaining a secondary location.
High availability
Many cloud-based services come with high availability (HA) features that can support your DR strategy. HA capabilities help ensure an agreed level of performance and offer built-in redundancy and automatic failover, protecting data against equipment failure and other smaller-scale events that may impact data availability.
Better compliance
DR planning supports compliance requirements by considering potential risks and defining a set of specific procedures and protections for your data and workloads in the event of a disaster. This usually includes strong data backup practices, DR sites, and regularly testing your DR plan to ensure that your organization is prepared.
What is disaster recovery used for?
Disaster recovery strategies help protect business operations in a number of important ways. Here are some common use cases.
Ensure business resilience
No matter what happens, a good DR plan can ensure that the business can return to full operations rapidly, without losing data or transactions.
Maintain competitiveness
When a business goes offline, customers are rarely loyal. They turn to competitors to get the goods or services they require. A DR plan prevents this.
Avoid regulatory risks
Many industries have regulations dictating where data can be stored and how it must be protected. Heavy fines result if these mandates are not met.
Avoid data loss
The longer a business’s systems are down, the greater the risk that data will be lost. A robust DR plan minimizes this risk.
Keep customers happy
Meeting customer service level agreements (SLAs) is always a priority. A well-executed DR plan can help businesses achieve SLAs despite challenges.
Maintain reputation
A business that has trouble resuming operations after an outage can suffer brand damage. For that reason, a solid DR plan is critical.
Conclusion
At Technolync, we understand the importance of a robust disaster recovery strategy in safeguarding your business’s continuity and resilience. Let us help you navigate the complexities of cloud-based systems and ensure your operations remain uninterrupted.