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What is disaster recovery?
In essence, disaster recovery is the process of preventing, mitigating and recovering from a disaster as efficiently as possible to ensure business continuity. It includes the start-to-finish processes of the backup and recovery of any and all data that a client deems important to protect.
Breaking it down, disaster recovery can be comfortably split into two major components:
backup and restoration (which we'll refer to as backup)
contingency planning (contingency)
Backup involves copying data so that it can be recovered if something goes wrong with the original data such as data loss, meaning that the company is prepared to rapidly implement a data recovery and restore the information that has been lost.
You can imagine how much time and money can be lost if data is lost, which can be anything from order information to stocking and logistics, to client and payment information, forcing clients' to go elsewhere or worse, losing trust in your brand.
The other side of disaster recovery, contingency, is all about being comprehensively prepared for rare scenarios when disaster recovery strategies like backups and data recovery don't work properly or in fact aren't available at all.
If an automated disaster recovery strategy falls through, it's important to have a contingency plan in place so that the business operations don't just grind to a complete halt. This can include having separate physical and virtual environments which all separately host copies of critical data so that there is not only one recovery point to access backed up data.
It’s easy to think all computers look the same.
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Why does disaster recovery matter?
In today's IT landscape, a disaster recovery solution should be an integral part of any functioning business' IT infrastructure.
It essentially involves the recovery strategy and required technology that can be combined to recover your critical systems and data when they are disrupted, damaged, or lost, by any manner of disaster.
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What is considered a disaster?
A disaster is quite a broad term encompassing any sort of accident that can happen that would compromise your businesses' data.
In the more literal sense, this could be something like a natural disaster in which your network hardware was physically damaged resulting in hardware failure, or a successful cyber attack that infiltrates one or more of your virtual environments, accessing business critical data.
There are plenty of other occurrences that could be deemed as disasters however, from experiencing storage failures (or in fact any other failed system), ransomware attacks, or in fact even human error or other internal errors, which can often happen during a digital transformation.
Despite the many different possible causes of a data disaster, there is luckily one single solution that can protect you in this event, and that's by utilising a recovery as a service company to provide you a comprehensive backup solution, poised for disaster recovery readiness at a moment's notice, like us for example.
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Why is it important to invest in disaster recovery solutions?
Disasters are by nature completely unpredictable, and as such any respectable business should consider a good disaster recovery plan as one of their security compliance requirements, as they can help to reduce downtime and loss of data.
It's important not to assume that you're immune to data security breaches just because you haven't experienced one yet. Without effective disaster recovery plans, your business is still at risk. By investing in reliable disaster recovery solutions, you can strengthen your business continuity and reputation while potentially cutting costs.
why is disaster recovery important your organisation?
The key to keeping your data secure, and keeping the business running
How can IT deliver better disaster recovery solutions for business continuity and data management?
As a general rule of thumb, the IT department in a business is responsible for providing the data protection and recovery services to the business, and setting recovery time objectives that the company can afford to work to.
So if this is the case in your business, then for you, data protection refers to the measures taken by IT to ensure that information stored on computers or networks isn't lost or altered.
And in the same respect, recovery refers to the restoration of access to lost or damaged files, as well as recovering from hardware failures, software errors and other problems that can cause downtime for your organisation's operations.
Disasters are a constant threat, so an in-house team can be a useful measure to plan ahead with, but it's often not cost-effective for a business to build and pay a team of IT experts full time that can enact a full recovery with ease.
Business continuity planning
If you work in HR or Management you'll likely know that business continuity planning involves developing strategies for dealing with disruptive events such as natural disasters or unexpected outages in utilities like electricity or water supply, and includes the loss of data.
Disaster recovery in terms of IT refers specifically to how an organisation plans for and responds when it experiences a disruptive event and data services are no longer accessible.
DR planning involves the creation of bespoke processes for how your employees will continue working during an outage so that they can continue delivering value despite being outside of their normal working environment.
A good example of this is copy data management, in which hard copies of data are kept up to date often so that employees can find and work with at least some of the information they need, if not all. This can even add some leeway to the recovery time objective, if even a minimal amount of value is being created in downtime.
How does a disaster recovery solution help with the business continuity planning process?
Disaster recovery is a key component of business continuity planning. Business continuity planning is a process that helps an organisation prepare for and respond to disruptive events. It involves identifying what could disrupt the business, how to prevent it and what to do if it happens.
Business continuity planning should include steps to be taken before, during and after any disaster strikes so that the business can recover quickly without having an impact on its bottom line offering or subsequent customer service levels.
So, what should I look for in my disaster recovery solution?
What should the perfect disaster recovery solution look like? Ideally, you want it to be an all-encompassing, custom-built solution that fits your businesses' needs perfectly, provides real-time protection, secure access and fast recovery of business-critical information in the unfortunate event of a disaster.
Your disaster recovery solution should be fully integrated with your existing infrastructure and ready to be scalable up or down as needed in-line with your company to ensure its performance matches the needs of your business.
From a security point-of-view, the solution should also include end-to-end encryption as standard so that sensitive data stays safe at all times (even during disaster scenarios such as huge migratory data loss or cyber attacks), and accessible in some format through a well-planned backup solution.
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What are the key elements of a good disaster recovery plan?
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The disaster recovery plan needs to be tested regularly
The plan will likely involve a mixture of securing data both on-premises and off-site, so the ability to move between and access all locations needs to be tested regularly. Companies should run mock tests where they see how quickly data services can be brought back online from a backup.
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The recovery plan should be updated regularly
Business operations are always evolving and expanding, so their recovery plans should be following suit. Having an outdated backup and recovery system can be as good as having no system in place, much the same as how an outdated ransomware recovery response is useless.
If you are paying a company to keep on top of your disaster recovery plan, take full advantage and make sure that they have the latest production systems in place to build your solution.
We constantly update our offering and make sure that our customers' solutions are updated at the same time, so that the space for error is constantly being minimised.
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Every employee needs to know the plan
Last but not least, the disaster recovery plan needs to be communicated to all staff members and understood by them, so that they can work effectively in the event of a disaster or emergency situation occurring.
Many companies operate with strict Governance Risk and Compliance guidelines in place company-wide so that it is clear who has completed what training and when. This can be particularly beneficial for rolling out disaster recovery plans as an integrated solution so that every single employee is in the know.
This communication should include any information regarding preventative measures as well, such as not using company machines on a public cloud, and training to know which cloud environments are safe. Not knowing the difference between public and private clouds is one of the leading ways in which an employee can erroneously compromise their company's security.
It's also important that everyone knows where key documents are stored, for example, paperwork relating specifically toward the running of IT systems may need storing somewhere different from general office documents like invoices, sales orders and customer information.
Documents pertaining to critical workloads that are necessary for the everyday running of the business must be prioritised, so that an enterprise backup can be fully encompassing and can lower costs lost in the event of a disaster.
Contact us to discuss our disaster recovery solutions
Our proven capability of delivering security focused managed support services alongside robust and cost-effective IT transformation projects makes us an ideal long-term IT partner and ideally placed to provide the services you need.