In a world where anything can happen, you have to ensure that your business remains standing even after unforeseen events. One way you can do this is through disaster recovery. It’s especially wise to have a disaster recovery plan in place to protect your bottom line.
Disaster recovery is the ability of your business or organization to basically weather a disaster event. These disaster events could be in the form of natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods. Or, it could also be caused by interruption to your internet connection, hardware or system failure, intentional cyber attacks (malware, ransomware, etc.), or employee error especially in terms of IT security or data loss. IT pros can offer solutions to ensure that your website is kept secure from hackers, malware attacks, data loss, downtime, or any other potential threat to its integrity or security.
Disaster could also come in the form of epidemics or pandemics, terrorist or biochemical attacks, and power outages or other technological hazards. In other words, a disaster event is anything that can cause a disruption or stoppage to the day-to-day operations of your business.
But, whether the disruptive or disaster event is natural or man-made, disaster recovery ensures you have a strategy in place to restore access and functionality to your IT infrastructure – ideally within minutes. It includes tools, processes, and policies that help your business recover faster and resume operations as soon as possible. Quicker recovery is made possible by a separate physical data center or through the use of the cloud. The former can cut into the budget of your business as it is expensive to build and maintain, but the latter makes this recovery site unnecessary. However, even the cloud has its set of potential risks.
How disaster recovery works
An effective disaster recovery is only as effective as its disaster recovery site – or more preferably sites. Again, a disaster recovery site can either be a physical data center or a cloud backup. Either way, businesses want redundancy when it comes to backing up their critical data, so a secondary or multiple locations would be ideal. In this way, if anything should happen to your primary disaster recovery site, you have at least one other backup you can rely on to recover important data and resume operations in minutes.
In addition, disaster recovery should also address three aspects: prevention, detection, and correction.
- Prevention includes creating backups and monitoring for configuration errors and compliance violations to ensure that your IT system or infrastructure is as secure and reliable as it can be. The goal, of course, is to prevent any mishaps from happening.
- Detection ensures you are able to discover any discrepancies, determine if a response is necessary, and fix any unwanted events as soon as possible.
- Correction includes preparations to ensure that backups and recovery procedures are in place as well as planning for any potential scenarios that might adversely affect your disaster recovery sites and plans.
Types of disaster recovery
The technologies and techniques you include in your disaster recovery plan will largely depend on your IT infrastructure, your backup and recovery needs, and the assets you need to protect.
- Backups – You can perform a simple backup of data to an external drive that you keep offsite or backup to an offsite system. You’ll need to keep this backup updated, though, and it also doesn’t include IT infrastructure.
- Point-in-time snapshots – These are basically copies of your files, databases, or other data stored in a separate location. Like a picture snapshot, the duplicated information is limited only to that specific point in time. In the event of a disruption, you can use this snapshot to restore the data and other information captured during that time, but there’s a risk that some data may be lost or information not updated.
- Disaster recovery sites – An improvement over backups and snapshots, disaster recovery sites are separate locations which have a backup of critical data, systems, and IT infrastructure. Your business can use these locations while your main location is in the process of repair or rebuilding.
- Virtual disaster recovery sites – It’s a disaster recovery site but in the cloud. It works similarly, i.e., creates a clone of your data and IT infrastructure, only this time it’s stored and run from virtual machines at an offsite location. With virtual disaster recovery sites, you’ll need to perform regular data and workload transfers but when disaster strikes, you’ll be able to easily load your backup and resume operations smoothly.
- Backup as a service (BaaS) – A third party provides the service of regularly backing up your data. Think of it as a type of virtual backups that happen without you lifting a finger.
- Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) – Again, a third party is involved, this time providing your business with a virtual disaster recovery site. They host your data and IT infrastructure on their cloud infrastructure and implement your disaster recovery plan in case of a disaster event.
How can disaster recovery benefit you?
As you might already surmise, disaster recovery can provide advantages for your business. Here are some of the benefits you’ll receive when you implement your own disaster recovery plan or strategy.
- Improved security – Thanks to its preventative protocols, which includes backups and monitoring of errors and violations, you can limit the possibility and/or impact of attacks. This can come in the form of access management, advanced encryption, and other security measures.
- Greater Compliance – Thanks to data privacy laws and standards, a disaster recovery strategy is now mandatory for most organizations. If you don’t have one, your business risks incurring violations and paying hefty fines.
- Better business continuity – When you have a disaster recovery strategy in place, you’re assured that your business can recover quickly should something unexpected happen. Thanks to replication of data and automated recovery, disaster recovery lessens the chances of your business losing data or of a lengthy or prolonged downtime, so it’s business as usual for you.
- Minimize losses and recovery costs – Losing important data or productivity can translate to monetary costs. These costs can come in the form of ransoms, penalties, or lost business. Disaster recovery, while not eliminating all costs or the possibility of losses altogether, can help reduce these losses and costs significantly, thanks to high availability features such as built-in redundancy.