A variety of disasters are able to cause temporary downtime or even permanent closure of your organization. A sudden power outage, an earthquake or a successful ransomware attack are only a few of the scenarios that can damage your hardware, digital infrastructure or critical data. Mostly, such emergencies are unpredictable and unpreventable regardless of the effort and investment made to build and develop data security systems.
The only efficient way to ensure the organization’s functioning is to have a thorough disaster recovery plan. In this post, we explain:
- What disaster recovery planning is
- Why your organization needs it
- How to create an efficient plan to recover after a disaster
What is Disaster Recovery Planning?
In short, disaster recovery planning means creating a document that describes in detail the instructions that your organization needs to follow in case of a disruptive event. Such disruptions include:
- Natural disasters (tornadoes, floods, earthquakes)
- Power outages
- Data breaches
- Software errors
- Global data loss incidents
- Ransomware attacks
One may confuse business continuity and disaster recovery plans due to the similarity of goals and a visible likelihood of structures. However, the contents of BC and DR plans should have different focus points.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Difference Explained
Although BC and DR concepts are not the same, putting business continuity vs disaster recovery in comparison or opposition is technically incorrect. Both BC and DR plans are needed to help an organization restore normal operation after a disaster. Their functions are different but they complement and not replace each other. A business continuity plan revolves around the entire organization’s functioning. On the other hand, disaster recovery planning is mostly an IT department’s concern.
Business continuity is the proactive action set called for to ensure an organization’s ability to respond to disruptions and guarantee stable production at a particularly required minimal level.
BC plans mainly concentrate on supporting the entire organization’s functioning when a disaster is happening and after the situation becomes more controllable. In a business continuity plan, you pay attention to multiple aspects inside and outside the organization, including:
- Guarding employees’ lives, health and safety
- Communication between teams and partners
- Notifying the required officials and media
- Taking care of real estate property
- IT environment
A business continuity plan defines staff roles, building evacuation schemes, communication channels and messages, as well as data protection workflows that an organization must activate in case of a disaster.
Disaster recovery is the reactive action set, describing the process, policies and procedures of tech infrastructure recovery. This includes the recovery of vital IT apps, databases and systems that enable an organization’s functioning.
An IT disaster recovery plan is a guide to recover the IT environment after a global disaster. DR is concentrated around downtime minimization and reduction of a disaster’s impact on the organization’s tech sector. DR plans help IT specialists bring critical workloads back online with the tightest possible recovery time and little to no data loss.
Why Is IT Disaster Recovery Planning Important?
The critical meaning of IT systems for contemporary organizations is impossible to overestimate. A thorough plan created in advance to recover IT systems allows for more effective recovery. As a result, an organization has more chances to survive and remain stable after a global disruption.
A well-build custom DR plan with well-distributed staff roles, as well as defined key messages, scripts and workflows, means quick and efficient reaction to different disaster scenarios. Cutting timings and organizing precisely directed processes, among other factors, can help either overcome the disaster completely or at least mitigate the consequences.
Data Loss Prevention
Losing data is among the most serious problems that a disaster can cause for an organization. Disaster recovery planning, which is impossible without including backup workflows, establishes data backup creation and regular refreshment, and it also describes the required recovery processes. With the backup and recovery guidelines at hand, IT specialists can prevent the loss of critical organization’s data with nearly 100% effectiveness.
Ensuring a tight recovery point objective (RPO) provides a high level of data resilience. Organizations can thus avoid loss of assets and reduce the financial consequences of a disaster. Recovering data from backups is significantly more affordable, fast and reliable than any attempt to restore original data from a damaged or encrypted drive.
Downtime Minimization
Another point that a DR plan helps to set is the recovery time objective (RTO). An RTO represents the maximum downtime an organization can tolerate without suffering from irreparable harm to production networks and, consequently, revenue loss.
Tight RTOs mean higher availability of services even after global disruptions. And reaching a tight RTO for the organization’s environment is possible only with the clear guidelines for key IT employees. Disaster recovery planning helps an organization to know its own infrastructure and data. Then, with that knowledge, IT specialists can come up with the optimal recovery scenarios before the real disaster strikes.
Customer Satisfaction
Reputational loss definitely stands among the most unwanted impacts for an organization. However, partners and customers nowadays demand stable service availability with little to no errors. They won’t tolerate failures and can stop using products or services soon after the disaster while disregarding the reason behind it.
An IT disaster recovery plan enabling an organization to meet RPO and RTO requirements means providing stable services and smooth customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to bring additional income themselves and also share their positive experiences, thus promoting an organization to new leads.
How-to Guide: Disaster Recovery Planning Steps
A plan can be effective only when built with thoroughness and attention to every detail. Check the following steps of a disaster recovery plan and apply them to ensure your DR guidelines can bring your IT infrastructure back online quickly and reliably.
Data and Infrastructure Mapping
To ensure fast system recovery and stability after a disaster, you need to know what exactly you should recover. Find out the role of every hardware and software component as well as the system that runs your organization’s workflows. Map out connections and specializations of physical servers and workstations, virtual machines, cloud and SaaS workflows, then prioritize them by importance.
You can also consult team members from other departments about the impact that would take place if particular workloads, networks or online resources fail. Apps and data with high priority require additional protection and fastest recovery possible.
Thinking over potential damage on infrastructure nodes in various disaster scenarios can also be useful. A ransomware attack and an earthquake, for example, will hit systems differently and, therefore, will require different recovery approaches.
Recovery Objectives
When you know which data and workflows are critical, proceed with defining the required recovery objectives. Those are two parameters: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
A recovery point objective sets the amount of data that the organization can lose upon recovery without facing critical consequences. Tighter RPOs mean more frequent backup workflows and also increase storage space requirements for backup repositories.
A recovery time objective determines the maximum downtime period that an organization can tolerate. Depending on the industry, acceptable downtimes may vary from several hours to mere minutes. Meeting fast RTOs may require serious investments, staff qualification and effort to set up spare IT infrastructure sites, enable networks and organize quick failovers.
Data Backup
Organizations frequently postpone creating data backups at least once, not to mention developing a workflow to refresh them regularly. If this is the case in your organization, disaster recovery planning would make you change your attitude to data backups. Things are simple here: a reliable DR plan is impossible without backups. Introduce a workflow to back up critical data and send that data off site, that is, to a location different from the main office or data center.
Consider keeping up with the industry-accepted 3-2-1 rule:
- Create at least three (3) copies of backup data.
- Store backups on two (2) different media or more.
- Store one (1) of those copies is off site.
For instance, you can keep one backup copy on a backup server for quick access and fast recovery. Simultaneously, the other copy is in the cloud for additional data control when the main site is unavailable.
When the required backup workflows are outlined, consider implementing a modern backup and recovery solution, like the NAKIVO disaster recovery solution. Such solutions enable you to automate the process of backup creation and updating, as well as the recovery of workloads and infrastructures in physical, virtual, SaaS and hybrid environments.
Responsibility Guide
At this point, you have the priorities, required instruments and recovery objectives. The next thing to consider in the disaster recovery planning steps is to distribute responsibilities among team members. Thus, they can study and understand the required actions before a disaster strikes. That preparation reduces the reaction time and increases the effectiveness of every employee when a global IT disruption happens. Apart from that, responsibilities’ delegation enables covering more issues per minute and reaching tighter RTOs due to that.
Insider Threat
When planning disaster recovery sequences, organizations reasonably concentrate on the danger coming from outside. Still, an inexperienced employee or a conscious bad actor in a team, for instance, can be a more serious threat to IT systems. To prevent malicious insiders from disrupting disaster recovery workflows, you can enhance the security by establishing a role-based access control for backup repositories. Additionally, consider adding two-factor authentication for DR admins to enhance the protection of workflows.
DR Testing and Update
As your organization grows and develops, new tech solutions can change DR requirements and priorities. You can keep up the pace with regular disaster recovery planning reviews, tests and adjustments. To remain effective, a disaster recovery plan must evolve along with the target IT infrastructure that plan is intended to support.
Conclusion
Disaster recovery planning means documenting the workflows required to restore an organization’s IT operations within the required timeframe in emergency cases. An efficient DR plan includes data and environment maps, defined recovery objectives, regular backup workflows, distributed responsibilities for IT team members and security enhancements. A thoroughly built DR plan helps to minimize system downtime, prevent data loss and ensure customer satisfaction, thus helping an organization avoid reputational and financial losses.