Imagine waking up one day to find that a cyberattack, natural disaster, or system failure has wiped out your company’s critical data. This is when IT disaster recovery (DR) becomes crucial. Without a solid IT disaster recovery plan, the consequences could be catastrophic. In this blog, we outline what IT disaster recovery is and what steps you can take to protect your business.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
IT disaster recovery refers to the strategies and processes a business puts in place to quickly restore IT operations after a disruptive event. The event could be anything from a power outage or hardware failure to a cyberattack or natural disaster. Disaster recovery planning has one overarching goal: ensuring your business can quickly resume normal operations.
Every minute your company is out of commission, you’re disappointing customers. Disaster recovery planning isn’t aimed at preventing equipment failures or improving your cybersecurity posture; it aims to restore the functionality of the business systems as fast as possible so the end user is minimally affected.
Disaster recovery also helps employees understand what to do when critical systems and business processes are impacted by a catastrophic incident. Creating practical backup procedures will empower stakeholders to mitigate data loss and get your business back up and running in the event of a disaster.
Why Is Disaster Recovery Important?
Disasters are unpredictable and their impact can be devastating. Without a disaster recovery plan, your business risks significant downtime when disaster strikes. A disruption to core business functions can lead to lost revenue, damaged reputation, and even legal consequences.
Regardless of what industry you operate within, data represents a critical element of your business operations. Protecting it is not just a technical issue, but a fundamental business requirement. A well-structured disaster recovery plan will help you maintain customer trust and hit recovery objectives in the aftermath of a critical incident.
What’s the Difference Between Disaster Recovery & Incident Response?
Protecting your business from the unexpected requires a functional understanding of disaster recovery and incident response (IR). Both play pivotal roles in protecting your IT infrastructure and creating a resilient organization. However, each serves a unique purpose and addresses different aspects of handling disruptions.
Incident response is the immediate, tactical approach to handling security breaches, ransomware or malware attacks, and any other threats to your company. The goal of IR is to detect, contain, and mitigate the effects of these threats as quickly as possible. Its process involves identifying the incident, analyzing its scope and impact, containing the threat, and recovering affected systems.
Imagine you own a physical storefront, and your burglar alarm goes off. Your alarm company notifies you of the incident. Once you verify that the incident is legitimate, you’ll contact law enforcement and take steps to minimize the damage to your business. Incident response serves a similar role in data protection and cyber threat mitigation.
Your disaster recovery strategy would address what happens after the virtual incident. Building on the burglary analogy, disaster recovery could involve things like making repairs to your store so you can begin serving customers again. Disaster recovery functions the same by restoring your data.
DR planning involves creating a comprehensive strategy to ensure data integrity and operational continuity. It’s about getting your IT systems up and running as quickly as possible so you can get back to serving your customers.
What Is RPO & RTO?
Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) are critical parts of any IT disaster recovery planning process.
RPO refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. It defines how much information your business can afford to lose in the event of a disruption. For instance, an RPO of four hours means you need to back up your data every four hours to prevent significant impacts on your business.
RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime after a disaster occurs. It indicates how quickly you need to restore your systems and resume normal operations to avoid catastrophic effects. An RTO of two hours means your disaster recovery plan should get systems up and running within that time frame after an incident.
Are you unsure about which RPO and RTO thresholds make sense for your company? Conduct a business impact analysis to determine the repercussions of different outage lengths and data loss windows.
While you want to keep your recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives as short as possible, it’s also important to customize these thresholds based on the needs of your business and your security resources. Shortening your RPO and RTO thresholds requires a greater investment of time, resources, and storage capacity.
What to Consider When Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan
Creating an effective disaster recovery plan requires holistic thinking. You cannot simply replicate data and use it to restore lost records after an incident. You’ve also got to address the following factors:
Accountability: Creating a Disaster Recovery Team
One of the first steps in disaster recovery planning is to establish the right team. This group should include members from multiple departments, such as IT, operations, communications, and management. Each person can provide a unique perspective on the criticality of certain tasks and help you decide where to prioritize your resources.
It’s also best to make these team members responsible for maintaining and updating the disaster recovery plan regularly. You should periodically review the strategy and make updates as needed.
If your company makes any major changes to its data or IT infrastructure, update your disaster recovery procedures to align with your alterations. For instance, transitioning from on-premises to cloud-based backup storage will drastically impact your DR planning.
Your strategy must align with the company’s risk profile and data management infrastructure. Always get your disaster recovery team involved before implementing major changes, and fine-tune your DR plan to adapt to any IT system updates.
Data Backup Solutions & Frequency
Data backup is at the heart of any disaster recovery plan. You need to choose the best backup solutions for your business, whether it’s cloud-based, on-premises, or a hybrid approach. For example, protecting an on-premises server requires a different strategy than cloud-based data. So, it’s important to consider how you are planning to backup your data.
One of the major decisions to make involves choosing a backup frequency. Your data files will revert to the last update in the event of a major breach or attack. Keep that in mind when choosing backup intervals.
Suppose you decide to backup your data every 24 hours, and a breach occurs at the 23rd hour. In this case, you would potentially lose 23 hours of business data. Can you tolerate such a loss? If so, then a 24-hour backup window would make sense for your company. If not, you may need to perform more frequent backups.
RPO & RTO Expectations
Clearly define your recovery point and recovery time objectives. Your entire DR plan will be based on meeting these thresholds. Knowing how much data loss you can tolerate and how quickly you need your systems restored will guide decisions like backup frequency, how to store your data, and what recovery processes you need to implement.
Modern tools use automation to help condense RTO and RPO windows. Taking advantage of these solutions can help you mitigate downtime while also minimizing total data loss when human error or a cyberattack occurs.
Testing and Optimizing Your Plan
Remember that your plan is only as good as its effectiveness during an actual disaster. A plan may look great on paper, but if it doesn’t ultimately meet your RTO and RPO goals, it’s not much use to your business.
Conduct drills and simulations to identify weaknesses and areas for improvement. Optimize your plan based on these results to enhance its reliability.
Make sure that your IT disaster recovery plan includes these eight essential elements:
- RTO and RPO targets
- An inventory of all digital and physical IT assets
- Clearly defined roles
- A map of disaster recovery sites and offsite data centers
- An understanding of where your data is stored
- A list of your most sensitive data
- A clear communication plan
- Disaster recovery drills and practice schedules
Testing may reveal that you’ve only partially incorporated these elements into your plan. For instance, you might discover that your communication strategies are too limited and need to be adjusted to make sure that your team can readily share information during a critical incident.
How Can Own Help With Disaster Recovery?
Our backup and recovery solution can be a valuable tool to help support your disaster recovery planning when it comes to your SaaS data. Own stores your backups outside of SaaS providers, meaning your data will still be accessible in the event of an outage, allowing you to maintain continuity. We also have automated backups and granular restore capabilities to help you minimize your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Learn more or request a demo below.
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