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When disaster strikes, an organization’s ability to resume normal operations and business functions depends on having a solid disaster recovery plan.
Surprisingly, the number of businesses with a thought-out disaster recovery (DR) plan at the ready is remarkably low. A little more than half of organizations have a company-wide disaster recovery plan in place, and just 50% of these organizations conduct regular disaster recovery testing once a year or even less.
However, disaster events occur more often than people realize, and 73% of companies have had a failure in critical systems at some point in their business lifespan. A catastrophic event—such as a natural disaster, cyber incident, or other major disruption—can threaten to incapacitate business operations at any time.
With these figures in mind, it is essential for businesses to have DR strategies in place that allow for both business continuity and the ability to recover data – (especially sensitive data) – so that the recovery process is fast and streamlined and doesn’t severely impair normal operations. Without a disaster recovery plan, organizations risk facing serious consequences, including financial loss and reputational damage, as unplanned outages can halt operations, impacting productivity and customer experience.
Table of Contents
When is Disaster Recovery Needed?
Disaster Recovery Planning
The Elements of a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
What are the Benefits of Having a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place?
How to Learn More About IT Disaster Recovery Solutions
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to the process by which an organization anticipates and formulates a plan to resume technology operations after a disaster occurs.
This entails maintaining critical business operations and preventing data loss during a disaster at a company’s primary business location. Often, a third-party provider is utilized for data backup and data protection. Backing up critical data is essential to ensure that vital information and applications are protected and can be recovered in the event of a disaster. This means that backup systems for organizations can operate as usual and prevent lost data due to equipment failure, power outages, network outages, or other impacts from a natural disaster or other crisis, and help restore access to IT systems and data as quickly as possible.
When is Disaster Recovery Needed?
There are a lot of situations that can put an organization in a crisis management mode. Hardware failures are a common example, as they can lead to significant disruptions and require immediate disaster recovery actions. Moreover, a good disaster recovery plan considers these many situations to ensure rapid recovery and minimize unplanned downtime, which can have serious financial and operational impacts.
An example of situations that requires a disaster recovery plan include the following:
Natural Disaster
Natural disasters are physical disasters that include tornados, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, or wildfires. Even if your company is located in a region where natural disasters have not been routinely impacted, there is no place in the country, or the world that is immune from a natural disaster.
To ensure business continuity during a natural disaster, organizations should utilize a secondary location as part of their disaster recovery planning, allowing data and workloads to be replicated and restored if the primary site is affected.
Pandemics or Epidemics
As the pandemic era demonstrated, pandemics can throw a wrench in normal operations for companies across all industries, even those not directly impacted by an epidemic.
Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks are frighteningly common and often lead to data loss or security breaches in critical assets.
One effective method for restoring data after a cyberattack is to use point in time copies, which capture the exact state of your system at a specific moment and allow you to recover data to that precise point.
Technological Hazards
Technological hazards can be as severe as explosions or other physical disasters or as simple as network or power outages. These events can significantly impact network infrastructure, disrupting connectivity and data transfer essential for business operations. Business continuity planning goes a long way to minimize recovery time and return to normal business operations.
Machine and Hardware Failure
Simple hardware or machine failures can hurt data protection or result in data loss, especially if they affect on-site backup storage equipment. Such failures put critical physical infrastructure—like power, cooling, storage, networks, and servers—at risk, threatening overall operational continuity. Human error and everyday system failures can significantly impact the ability to maintain business operations and are another common cause of company-wide disasters.
Remember that this is just a sample of when disaster recovery is needed. Additionally, an effective disaster recovery plan anticipates the unexpected and has a disaster recovery strategy that can align with any disaster.
Disaster Recovery Planning
The first step in the disaster recovery process is to craft a detailed plan that outlines emergency response requirements, backup operations, and recovery procedures, in addition to other disaster recovery strategies.
These organization-specific details are defined by the following metrics, also known as disaster recovery objectives.
Recovery time objective (RTO): A recovery time objective (RTO) refers to the maximum acceptable length of time that a company’s systems and applications can be down or unavailable without causing significant and lasting damage. The maximum amount of downtime allowed is determined by the RTO, ensuring business operations resume within this upper limit. For example, when determining recovery time objectives, you may notice that some applications used in your business can be offline for several hours while others must recover in minutes to ensure business continuity.
Recovery point objective (RPO): The recovery point objective refers to the most recent acceptable data backup needed for recovery to resume operations after a major event, like a natural disaster. The maximum age of backup files that can be used for recovery is defined by the RPO, ensuring data integrity and minimizing data loss. Recovery point objectives help define how often data backups need to occur to recover from a disaster in the optimal amount of time.
Once the recovery point objective and recovery time objective have been defined, a disaster recovery team will better understand how to formulate a detailed recovery strategy going forward.
These two metrics are also especially instrumental when conducting risk assessments, risk analysis, and business impact analysis for potential disasters, from minimally invasive events like a power outage to worst-case scenarios. Risk assessments play a critical role in disaster recovery planning by identifying potential threats, evaluating vulnerabilities, and establishing appropriate recovery goals.
The Elements of a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
Generally, a disaster recovery (DR) plan covers three elements for a complete recovery strategy. The key components of a disaster recovery plan include backup sites, cloud deployment strategies, application prioritization, and dependency mapping. DR plans outline the strategies and procedures organizations use to ensure business continuity and minimize downtime in the event of a disaster.
Preventative
The preventative part of disaster recovery ensures that systems are as secure and reliable as possible by utilizing tools or strategies that prevent a disaster from occurring in the first place. This could include physical initiatives, like implementing fire suppression tools where sensitive data and equipment are stored or enlisting a data center from a third-party provider to ensure data is constantly protected and backed up by an expert in disaster recovery.
Detective
When it comes to rapid recovery, fast detection is key to preventing data loss and minimizing the time that business operations are down. The detection area of a disaster recovery plan allows businesses to pinpoint when a threat is imminent or occurring, such as detecting a possible cyberattack.
Corrective
Corrective measures address the steps required for crisis management for varying disaster recovery scenarios. One of the key corrective actions is to restore systems, ensuring that critical operations and data are brought back online after a disruption. This includes how to recover important data, get business operations and systems back online, and utilize internal and external communication to keep everyone on the same page regarding the specifics of the disaster recovery plan.
Analyzing Assets and Risk
A foundational step in disaster recovery planning is thoroughly analyzing your organization’s assets and risks. This process begins by identifying the critical systems, data, and infrastructure that are essential to maintaining business operations. By cataloging these assets, organizations can better understand which components are most vital to their continued success and which require the highest level of protection.
Conducting a comprehensive risk assessment is equally important. This involves evaluating potential risks and threats—ranging from natural disasters like floods and hurricanes to human error, equipment failure, and other disruptive events. By assessing the likelihood and potential impact of these scenarios, organizations can anticipate where vulnerabilities exist and what the consequences of data loss or downtime might be.
With this knowledge, businesses can prioritize their disaster recovery efforts, ensuring that recovery strategies and contingency plans are tailored to address the most significant risks. This targeted approach not only helps minimize the impact of disasters but also ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, supporting a swift and effective recovery when it matters most.
Disaster Recovery Team and Personnel
A successful disaster recovery plan relies on having a dedicated disaster recovery team in place. This team should be composed of personnel from key departments such as IT, operations, and management, each bringing unique expertise to the table. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities are essential, so every team member knows exactly what to do in the event of a disaster.
The disaster recovery team is responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the disaster recovery plan, as well as ensuring that regular testing and training exercises are conducted. These activities help keep everyone prepared and ensure that the plan remains effective as the organization evolves.
Effective communication and collaboration are crucial, both within the team and with external partners. Establishing relationships with third-party providers, such as cloud services and equipment vendors, ensures that critical resources and support are available when needed. By fostering a culture of preparedness and teamwork, organizations can respond quickly and efficiently to any disaster, minimizing downtime and facilitating a smooth recovery.
High Availability in Disaster Recovery
High availability is a cornerstone of any robust disaster recovery strategy. It refers to the ability of an organization to maintain continuous business operations and access to critical systems, even in the face of a disaster. Achieving high availability often involves implementing redundant systems, failover mechanisms, and load balancing to ensure that if one component fails, another can immediately take its place.
Modern disaster recovery solutions frequently leverage virtual machines and cloud-based infrastructure, allowing organizations to restore data and resume operations rapidly in the event of a disaster. These technologies help minimize downtime, reduce the risk of data loss, and protect against financial losses and reputational damage that can result from prolonged outages.
For organizations that depend heavily on IT infrastructure, high availability is not just a technical goal—it’s a business imperative. By investing in high availability measures, companies can ensure that their critical systems remain accessible, their data is protected, and their recovery process is as seamless as possible.
Let’s look at some IT disaster recovery solutions and other considerations for an effective disaster recovery plan.
There are many options for identifying the best disaster recovery solution (or solutions) for your organization. These types of disaster recovery solutions can include cloud services, utilizing data centers, having a specific DR site or recovery site, or all the above. Recovery as a service is a cloud-based option that automatically replicates and restores data during disasters, offering advantages over traditional methods.
A sample of these varying disaster recovery methods includes the following.
For more detail about specific disaster recovery solutions, feel free to reach out or consult our resources.
Backing Up to Prevent Data Loss
Backing up sensitive and essential data is the easiest thing a company can do to prevent data loss. Often, the best data backup options entail identifying solutions outside of everyday business operations and systems.
For example, cloud services can store a wealth of data, allowing you to access essential documents or other information easily and outside the disaster site. Cloud disaster recovery is often an easy method for storing data, although when it comes to cloud disaster recovery, there are some inherent drawbacks.
For one thing, while cloud recovery methods can help to prevent data loss, the equipment that powers your business continuity is not protected as it would be at an outside disaster recovery site, like a data center. Simply put, a cloud disaster recovery plan can be a core part of your overall disaster recovery strategy, but it shouldn’t be your sole disaster recovery plan.
Data Center Disaster Recovery
For even more peace of mind, you can store your essential equipment, systems, and data at a third-party data center, off-premises DR site, or recovery site to ensure that all your businesses’ technological infrastructure is constantly protected. DR sites play a crucial role in disaster recovery by providing geographically distant locations to restore operations and maintain business continuity after extreme disruptions.
A data center is designed to protect an organization’s infrastructure. Data centers have fire suppression tools, backup power sources, and protected environments and are the safest disaster recovery sites, regardless of the worst-case scenarios that can hinder business continuity. A data center is also one of the fastest ways to prevent data loss and restore data in an emergency. Also, a data center located away from the business itself may be immune from a physical disaster (like a natural disaster) in the first place.
Virtualized Disaster Recovery
In virtualized disaster recovery, businesses back up their data and systems using off- premises virtual machines, or VMs, that may not be impacted by physical disasters. This virtualization allows businesses to automate some processes, such as the continual transference of workloads, in order to create a faster recovery time and help ensure business continuity.
Cold Site Disaster Recovery
Cold site disaster recovery entails having a second and mostly unused location where a business can move its operations and employees to work during the height of a disaster. In contrast, a hot site is a fully equipped, continuously updated alternative data center that allows immediate business operations recovery after an IT disaster, minimizing downtime due to its readiness to take over critical systems instantly.
However, there are some notable drawbacks to having an internal disaster recovery site in case of an emergency. For one thing, while having a cold or disaster recovery site helps ensure business continuity, it does not help prevent data loss like a third-party data center. In addition, having an in-house disaster recovery site can be expensive. Even if the business already owns the facilities (so no rent is required), the DR site still needs to be constantly available and functioning to be instantly used when a disaster strikes.
Remember that the above types of disaster recovery methods are just the tip of the iceberg, and hybrid solutions may also be available to address an organization’s specific pain points.
The best way to make disaster recovery work is to have several types of disaster recovery initiatives in place, such as utilizing a data center. At the same time, it is also essential to create an in-house disaster recovery team focusing on internal data backups and cloud services.
Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Solutions
Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions have become increasingly popular due to their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. By storing data and applications in the cloud, organizations can ensure rapid restoration and access to critical systems in the event of a disaster. These solutions often include automated failover and failback capabilities, which help minimize downtime and support business continuity.
One of the key advantages of cloud-based disaster recovery is real-time replication, which keeps data continuously updated and available, even during disruptive events. This ensures that organizations can achieve high availability and rapid restoration, reducing the impact of disasters on business operations.
By leveraging the power of the cloud, businesses can implement disaster recovery strategies that are both robust and adaptable, providing peace of mind and a strong foundation for ongoing recovery efforts.
Testing and Optimizing Disaster Recovery Plans
Regular testing and optimization are essential to ensure that your disaster recovery plan will perform as expected when faced with real-world challenges. By conducting routine tests that simulate various types of disasters—such as natural disasters, human error, and equipment failure—organizations can identify gaps and weaknesses in their recovery procedures.
These tests should be complemented by regular training exercises, ensuring that all personnel are familiar with their roles and can execute the disaster recovery plan effectively. Continuous improvement is key: after each test or actual event, review the outcomes, update the plan to address any shortcomings, and adjust for changes in infrastructure, personnel, or business operations.
By making testing and optimization an ongoing part of your disaster recovery process, you can minimize downtime, prevent data loss, and ensure that your organization is always prepared to recover quickly and efficiently from any disruptive event.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place?
Assured business continuity
When it comes to the question, “Why is disaster recovery important?” The most obvious answer is that it ensures business continuity. A smart recovery strategy ensures that a business doesn’t lose time, resources, and data and can get back to normal as soon as possible without incurring further damage due to a loss of revenue or, perhaps more importantly, a loss in reputation and brand loyalty.
Cost savings
Data loss and a significant and noticeable gap in business continuity are expensive, and when all resources are focused on crisis management, the loss in revenue is huge. In addition, replacing equipment, systems, and data can be expensive when a natural disaster or other disaster occurs, and your infrastructure is not stored in an outside site, like a data center. A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy mitigates this substantial financial risk and provides a safety net if or when the worst-case scenario occurs.
Better compliance
Some industries require a well-defined discovery recovery plan to ensure that organizations stay within a particular sector’s strict legal or other regulations, such as medical practices, financial institutions, and any business that handles sensitive and important data. As such, in these cases, recovery strategies aren’t just advisable. They must maintain compliance and avoid reprimands or legal issues that can also impact business continuity.
Faster recovery time
When a disaster occurs, the number one goal of crisis management is to get to the other side. A smart recovery strategy focuses on returning to normal business operations as soon as possible, and a comprehensive disaster recovery plan does exactly that.
Better security
One of the most immediate benefits of implementing recovery strategies is that you automatically create better protection for your data and business operations. For example, moving your IT infrastructure to a data center prevents data loss from on-site natural disasters, cyberattacks, or other events that may hurt your business’s physical location but not your data and systems.
Learn More About IT Disaster Recovery Solutions
The first step in creating a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy is to partner with an expert in disaster recovery services who can offer solutions tailored to your organization’s distinctive metrics, needs, and pain points.
This is where DartPoints can fill in the gaps and help you craft the best disaster recovery plan for your business.
Our cutting-edge technology and facilities provide limitless solutions for disasters as well as your everyday business operations.
From lightning-fast interconnectivity for daily operations to 24/7/365 support when a disaster strikes, our experts can protect your critical infrastructure while providing opportunities to work faster and more efficiently every day.
Reach out to us today to learn more about our many discovery recovery plan options. With a resource and partner like DartPoints behind the scenes, you can rest assured that your organization is well protected and will remain up and running, no matter what the future brings.