A well-defined Disaster Recovery Plan is essential to ensure the survival of your business in a disaster. It encompasses the processes and technologies necessary to restore business operations.
A leading DR solution offers near-zero data loss while bolstering your business continuity stance. IT teams can architect a DR solution independently or partner with a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider. Click the Disaster Recovery Companies to learn more.
Creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan requires more than simply making data backups. It involves setting up alternate means of operation in advance to enable continued business operations should a disruption occur.
DR planning gained popularity in the 1970s as companies began to depend more on computer-based operations. Back then, many systems were batch-oriented and could be restored from offsite mainframes that could be loaded after an outage. Today, however, most organizations must be able to restore critical services within minutes, if not seconds, of a disruption. This is due to the expectation of continuous service and the significant financial losses that can occur with long outages.
Every organization is different, and each has its own unique needs for a disaster recovery plan. Some may want to prioritize the resumption of normal operations, while others may be more concerned with reconstructing or salvaging critical University records. The first step in developing a disaster recovery plan is to identify the priorities of the organization, which can be done by conducting a risk assessment and business impact analysis.
Another step is to determine what constitutes a disaster. This helps to avoid overreacting to a minor disruption, which can waste resources and money. For example, a temporary power outage and a direct hit from a Category Four hurricane require different responses.
A final step is to create a plan document that is easy to understand and comprehensive. This can be accomplished by laying out the responsibilities of each team member in clear and easy-to-follow terms. It should include templates for identifying team members and their information, contact lists, notification calling trees, disaster recovery procedures, RTO and RPO commitments, and more.
Once a Disaster Recovery plan is in place, it should be tested on a regular basis. This helps to identify any holes in the plan, which can be fixed before a disaster occurs. The best practice is to test the plan during off hours so as not to disrupt normal business activities.
Prevention
During the prevention phase, disaster management leaders use problem-solving skills to identify potential threats and hazards. They develop strategies and structural changes to minimize the impact of a disaster and spread awareness in the community about ways to stay safe. Structural measures could include clearing trees to prevent their falling on houses during storms, and non-structural measures might include encouraging residents to follow safety instructions from local authorities.
Developing and implementing a business continuity plan (BCP) is an important part of the recovery process. The BCP includes backup procedures, a primary disaster recovery site and steps to restart, reconfigure and recover systems and networks in the event of an unplanned outage or other disaster. BCPs are often created by a committee of people representing critical areas or departments, such as management, computing, risk management and records management.
The DR team should review and update the written plan on an annual basis to ensure that it is still relevant, incorporating any changes in IT infrastructure, business processes or potential risk factors. It’s also a good idea to create test plans and perform periodic tests to pinpoint vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. The DR team should regularly meet to review and discuss the BCP and its implementation.
A comprehensive DR plan must incorporate cybersecurity. It’s essential to install security software on all electronic devices and to implement two-factor authentication, as well as to keep all system updates up-to-date. This prevents cyberattacks and keeps IT systems running smoothly, even when employees are experiencing a crisis.
The DR team should also consider partnering with a vendor that provides a secure cloud environment and a suite of security services to protect data from an outage or other disaster. This is a cost-efficient option that can also help to improve employee productivity during an incident by reducing the amount of time they need to spend on recovery. Additionally, vendors can provide ongoing data backups that are stored at multiple sites and offer a high level of availability to eliminate single points of failure. This can make the difference between a quick recovery and an extended period of downtime.
Recovery
When disaster strikes, your business must be able to resume operations quickly and restore critical services. That means developing a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, and it requires an understanding of the risks that your company faces. These may be natural, like an earthquake or hurricane, geopolitical events, civil unrest in your region, failure to critical equipment such as servers, Internet connections or software, cyber attacks, industrial accidents and more. Having a DR plan in place, and regularly testing it, can reduce the impact of these risks on your business and help identify vulnerabilities.
A DR plan defines the steps your organization must take to restore IT systems and data to a fully operational state after a disruption. It should be based on your Recovery Time Objectives, which determine the maximum amount of downtime you can sustain before significant business damage occurs. This is usually reflected in a dollar amount, but it can also be defined as an amount of time. An accounting firm, for example, may be able to withstand up to a day of downtime without losing client records, while an eCommerce site must be online immediately.
You should also define which types of disasters your DR plans are designed to respond to. Generally, your DR plans will cover the most likely and most severe threats to your company, including natural disasters, geopolitical events, failure of critical hardware, software or Internet connections, and cyber attacks. Your DR plan should also address your backup processes and technologies, such as failover and switchover, to enable quick transitions to the backup system during unexpected interruptions, or as part of an extended recovery from a disaster.
You can implement your DR plans on-premises, as in the case of an IT team that manages its own dedicated backup servers, or you can deploy a DR service or solution to automatically replicate and mirror data and applications to a secondary location. This is sometimes referred to as DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service. With a DRaaS solution, you can spin up on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure only when required, to eliminate costly and hard-to-manage secondary sites that sit idle most of the time. You can also use a modern backup and next-gen data management platform to seamlessly converge DR with backup for optimal cost efficiency, risk reduction and agility.
Continuity
A business’s data and the digital technologies that create, store, process, and analyze it are critical to its operations. Without them, customers lose faith in the brand, and businesses suffer from lost revenue and diminished reputation. To preempt this damage, disaster recovery plans ensure that mission-critical systems and services continue to function as expected in the event of a disruption.
Whether your team oversees the plan internally or you work with an externally managed service provider, it should contain detailed and comprehensible information about your organization’s IT infrastructure. It should also include a list of accountable parties for troubleshooting and ensuring that all processes and applications are working correctly. The plan should also document how to contact IT support in an emergency and provide instructions for contacting key personnel during a crisis.
The best way to test your DR plan is by running a full-scale drill, which typically includes maintaining operations from the failover site for an extended period of time. If a full-scale drill isn’t possible, it’s important to conduct frequent and ongoing tests of individual applications, including their interdependencies. This testing will help identify gaps in your procedures that can result in downtime or inability to meet RTOs and RPOs in a real-world failure scenario.
As your business grows and changes, you’ll need to update your DR plan accordingly. Fortunately, many disaster recovery solutions offer the flexibility to adapt to your needs. For example, leading DR solutions such as Cohesity enable you to restore a wide range of applications instantly from a single location using automated backups, replication, and failover and failback orchestration.
If you decide to build a traditional DR solution on-premises, it will likely require upfront capital investment in hardware for the failover environment, as well as ongoing costs for maintenance, labor for monitoring and management, and network connectivity. To avoid these costs, look for a vendor that offers a flexible managed DR solution such as cloud-based DR or a DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering. DRaaS solutions eliminate the need to maintain redundant hardware for the failover environment, so you can lower overall costs while increasing availability and speed.