Disaster recovery is the organization’s way of re-accessing and operating on its IT infrastructure in the event of events such as a natural disaster, cyber-attacks, or business disruptions. Various disaster recovery measures (DR) can be part of the disaster recovery plan. DR is one of the hallmarks of business continuity.

How does disaster recovery work?

Disaster recovery depends on the duplication of data and computer processing in a non-disaster area. When servers slow down due to a natural disaster, machine failure, or cyber-attack, an entity needs to recover lost data from a second location where the data was backed up. Appropriately, the organization can transfer its computer processing to that remote location and to continue operating.

5 top features of an operative disaster recovery plan

Disaster Recovery Team: This dedicated team of experts will be committed to building, implementing, and managing the DRP. This plan should describe the roles and responsibilities of each team member. In the event of a disaster, the recovery team should know how to communicate with others, employees, vendors, and customers.

Risk assessment:

Assess potential risks that put your business at risk. Depending on the nature of the event, consider what steps and resources will require to restart the business. For example, in the event of a cyber-attack, what data protection measures will the recovery team have to respond to?

Identifying the most important assets in a business:

A good disaster recovery plan comprises documents on which programs, applications, data, and other resources are most important for business development, as well as the necessary steps to obtain data.

Backups:

Decide what requires be backing up (or relocating), who should make the backups, and how the backups will be used. Include a recovery point objective (RPO) indicating the frequency of backups and the recovery time objective (RTO) which describes the maximum allowable rest period after a crash. These metrics create limitations to guide IT strategy selection, procedures, and processes that make up an organization’s DRP. The amount of rest time an organization can handle and how often an organization keeps its data will inform the disaster recovery plan.

Evaluation and efficiency:

The recovery team should continue to evaluate and update its strategy to address emerging threats and business needs. By continuing to ensure that the company is prepared to deal with the worst situations in the event of a disaster, it can successfully navigate these challenges. In planning how you will respond to cyberattacks, for example, it is important for organizations to continue to monitor and implement their security and data protection strategies and to have security measures in place to detect potential security breaches.

What are the types of disaster recovery?

Businesses can pick from several disaster recovery strategies, or combine numerous:

Backup:

This is a very simple type and involves storing data off-site or removable drive. However, data support only offers the benefit of business continuity, because the IT infrastructure itself has not been backed up.

Read more about What is Computer Security? Introduction to Computer Security

Cold Area:

In this type, the organization puts the basic, second-served infrastructure in place to provide workers with a place to work after a natural disaster or fire. It can help with business continuity because business activities can continue. But it does not provide a way to protect or retrieve important data. So the cold environment should be integrated with other disaster recovery measures.

Hot Site:

The hot site keeps up-to-date copies of data. Hot sites take more time to set up and are more expensive than cold areas, but they greatly reduce downtime.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS):

In the event of a disaster or ransomware attack, the DRaaS provider deploys the organization’s computer processing into its cloud infrastructure. However, permitting the business to continue to operate offline at the vendor’s site, even if the organization’s servers are low. DRaaS applications are available with subscription or pay-per-use models. There are pros and cons to choosing a local DRaaS provider. Latency will be lower after transferring to DRaaS servers that are closer to the organization’s location but in the event of a widespread natural disaster. Nearby DRaaS may equally effect by the disaster.

Backup as a service:

Same as to remote data backup, with Back-Up as a Service, third-party provider backs up organizational data, but not its IT infrastructure.

Datacenter disaster recovery:

Datacenter resources can protect data and contribute to rapid disaster recovery in certain types of disasters. For example, fire suppression tools will help data and computer equipment survive the fire. Moreover, the energy source will save businesses from sailing without having to grind to a halt. Of course, none of these disaster recovery tools will be helpful in the event of a cyber-attack.

Virtualization:

Companies can back up certain tasks and data or the same image of an entire computer organization on virtual reality machines that are not affected by physical disasters. Using virtualization as part of a disaster recovery plan and allowing businesses to perform specific disaster recovery processes, restore everything online quickly. For virtualization to be an effective tool for disaster recovery. Moreover, data transfer and job uploading are essential, as good communication within the IT team about how many virtual machines operate within an organization.

Point-in-time copies:

Point-in-time copies, also known as time-in-time abbreviations, make a copy of the entire database at some point. Information may be restored to this archive. However, only if the copy is stored outside the site or on a virtual machine untouched by the disaster.

Quick Recovery:

Quick Recovery is like copy-time copies, except that instead of copying the database, a quick recovery takes a complete machine summary.