Disaster Recovery: What Is It?

Disaster Recovery (DR): What Is It?

The term “disaster recovery” (DR) refers to a strategy used by an organization to regain functioning and access to its IT infrastructure following a natural disaster, cyberattack, or even business disruptions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. IT best practices and technology are used in disaster recovery (DR) to avoid or reduce data loss and business disruption brought on by major catastrophes.

These occurrences can range from equipment malfunctions and isolated power outages to cyberattacks, civil emergencies, criminal or military attacks, and natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, among other things. Business continuity must include DR as a key component.

The occurrence of any such devastating incidents that go undiscovered has an equal impact on businesses of all kinds, whether they are tiny, mid-sized, or huge. However, SMEs frequently overlook these, failing to create a solid, workable disaster recovery plan. They have little defense against the serious threat that these disruptive occurrences can represent to their core structures. While significant application failure can cost somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million per hour, infrastructure failure can cost as much as $100,000 per hour. Many businesses struggle to bounce back from such losses. After surviving such a catastrophe, about 40% of small enterprises do not reopen, and roughly 25% fail within the first year after the crisis. Consequently, putting in place a disaster recovery strategy can significantly lower the chances of such disasters. The following steps are included in DR planning:

1. Strategizing

2. Planning

3. Utilizing the right technologies

4. Testing and monitoring

In addition, a crucial part of disaster recovery planning is storing backups of an organization’s data. Maintaining appropriate storage and compute to allow reliable failover and failback operations is another aspect of disaster recovery. In order to minimize the disruptive effects of the disaster on the production processes and end-user experiences, failover is the practice of offloading workloads to backup systems. Failback entails returning to the main systems.

How does DR function?

Replication of data and computer processing that can be done at an off-premises location that is not impacted by the event is crucial for disaster recovery. A firm has to restore lost data from a secondary site where the data is backed up in cases where the servers are down due to a natural disaster, equipment failure, or cyberattack. In this case, the secondary site is outside the disaster’s impact zone. In order to maintain its commercial activities, an organization can move its computer processing to that distant site.

Top 5 components of a successful DR strategy

Any DR plan’s backup is essentially its backbone.

The companies must decide what data needs to be backed up (or moved), who should perform the backups, and how to implement them. Both a recovery time target (RTO) and a recovery point objective (RPO), which specify how often backups should be made, should be included in the plan. These metrics establish boundaries to direct an organization’s disaster recovery plan’s selection of IT strategy, processes, and procedures. How much downtime a business can tolerate and how regularly it backs up its data determine the disaster recovery plan.

Evaluation of business-critical assets 

The key processes required to recover data are included in an efficient DR strategy, along with documentation of the crucial systems, applications, data, and other resources that are important for business continuity.

DR team

The DR team is a group of experts tasked for developing, overseeing, and managing the DR plan. In order for the DR team to know who to call and how to interact with the employees, vendors, and customers, in turn, in the case of a catastrophe, the role and responsibilities of each team member should be specified in the plan.

Risk assessment

The potential risks that could endanger the organization are found throughout the risk appraisal process. Depending on the nature of the event, an evaluation is done. The company must plan what steps and resources might be necessary to resume operations and regain its prior position.

Checking for updates

To handle ever changing cyber risks and business requirements, the DR team should regularly monitor, test, and update its recovery approach. The organization can overcome any such obstacle by making sure that a business is consistently prepared and armed for the worst-case scenarios in emergency situations.

In conclusion, disaster recovery is a necessary process that all companies should have in place. If you do not have a disaster recovery plan in place for your business, you are putting yourself at risk for greater losses than you may realize.

How Global Secure Solutions Can Help

A sudden disaster could shut down your business and put you out of commission. If this happens, a reliable backup solution can help. Our backup service, Prometheus Shield, provides your business with features like physical and virtual server backup, backup for Microsoft 365, faster backups and restores, security-focused storage, and much more. To learn more about how Prometheus Shield can help you protect your business from disasters click the link https://bit.ly/3zEbi3G