What is Disaster Recovery?

A disaster is an unexpected problem resulting in a slowdown, interruption, or network outage in an IT system. Outages come in many forms, including the following examples:

• An earthquake or fire
• Technology failures
• System incompatibilities
• Simple human error 
• Intentional unauthorized access by third parties

These disasters disrupt business operations, cause customer service problems, and result in revenue loss. A disaster recovery plan helps organizations respond promptly to disruptive events and provides key benefits.

Ensures business continuity

When a disaster strikes, it can be detrimental to all aspects of the business and is often costly. It also interrupts normal business operations, as the team’s productivity is reduced due to limited access to tools they require to work. A disaster recovery plan prompts the quick restart of backup systems and data so that operations can continue as scheduled. 

Enhances system security

Integrating data protection, backup, and restoring processes into a disaster recovery plan limits the impact of ransomware, malware, or other security risks for business. For example, data backups to the cloud have numerous built-in security features to limit suspicious activity before it impacts the business. 

Improves customer retention

If a disaster occurs, customers question the reliability of an organization’s security practices and services. The longer a disaster impacts a business, the greater the customer frustration. A good disaster recovery plan mitigates this risk by training employees to handle customer inquiries. Customers gain confidence when they observe that the business is well-prepared to handle any disaster. 

Reduces recovery costs

Depending on its severity, a disaster causes both loss of income and productivity. A robust disaster recovery plan avoids unnecessary losses as systems return to normal soon after the incident. For example, cloud storage solutions are a cost-effective data backup method. You can manage, monitor, and maintain data while the business operates as usual. 

An effective disaster recovery plan includes the following key elements. 

Internal and external communication

The team responsible for creating, implementing, and managing the disaster recovery plan must communicate with each other about their roles and responsibilities. If a disaster happens, the team should know who is responsible for what and how to communicate with employees, customers, and each other. 

Recovery timeline

The disaster recovery team must decide on goals and time frames for when systems should be back to normal operations after a disaster. Some industries’ timelines may be longer than others, while others need to be back to normal in a matter of minutes. 

The timeline should address the following two objectives.

Recovery time objective 

The recovery time objective (RTO) is a metric that determines the maximum amount of time that passes before you complete disaster recovery. Your RTOs may vary depending on impacted IT infrastructure and systems.

Recovery point objective

A recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of time acceptable for data loss after a disaster. For example, if your RPO is minutes or hours, you will have to back up your data constantly to mirror sites instead of just once at the end of the day.

Data backups

The disaster recovery plan determines how you back up your data. Options include cloud storage, vendor-supported backups, and internal offsite data backups. To account for natural disaster events, backups should not be onsite. The team should determine who will back up the data, what information will be backed up, and how to implement the system.

Testing and optimization 

You must test your disaster recovery plan at least once or twice per year. You can document and fix any gaps that you identify in these tests. Similarly, you should update all security and data protection strategies frequently to prevent inadvertent unauthorized access.

When disaster recovery planning, businesses implement one or several of the following methods.

Backup

Backing up data is one of the easiest methods of disaster recovery that all businesses implement. Backing up important data entails storing data offsite, in the cloud, or on a removable drive. You should back up data frequently to keep it up to date. For example, by backing up to AWS, businesses get a flexible and scalable infrastructure that protects all data types. 

Data center disaster recovery

In the event of certain types of natural disasters, appropriate equipment can protect your data center and contribute to rapid disaster recovery. For example, fire suppression tools help equipment and data survive through a blaze, and backup power sources support businesses’ continuity in case of power failure. Similarly, AWS data centers have innovative systems that protect them from human-made and natural risks.

Virtualization 

Businesses back up their data and operations using offsite virtual machines (VMs) not affected by physical disasters. With virtualization as part of the disaster recovery plan, businesses automate some processes, recovering faster from a natural disaster. The continuous transfer of data and workloads to VMs like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is essential for effective virtualization. 

Disaster recovery as a service

Disaster recovery services like AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery can move a company’s computer processing and critical business operations to its own cloud services in the event of a disaster. Therefore, normal operations can continue from the provider’s location, even if on-premises servers are down. Elastic Disaster Recovery also protects from Regions in the cloud going down. 

Cold site

In the event of a natural disaster, a company moves its operations to another rarely used physical location, called a cold site. This way, employees have a place to work, and business functions can continue as normal. This type of disaster recovery does not protect or recover important data, so another disaster recovery method must be used alongside this one.