What is Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is an area of security planning which aims at protecting an organization and its data, from the effects of negative events. This includes a set of policies and procedures that enable the recovery of important technology infrastructure and systems, following a natural or human-made disaster. Disaster can be anything that puts an organization’s normal functioning at risk. 

It can range from cyber attack to equipment failure. Disaster recovery allows an organization to resume critical functions efficiently, following a disaster.     

How is Disaster Recovery Important?

Many businesses have failed after experiencing a significant data loss. With the growing importance given to the efficient operation of an organization, the need for a continuous operation, and speedy recovery have also increased. 

Researchers have proved the idea that including a holistic and pre-disaster planning method is more cost-effective in a long run. 

There are two major measurements of disaster recovery. They are

• RPO (Recovery point objective)

• RTO (Recovery time objective) 

The maximum age of files to be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume after a disaster is called recovery point objective. It determines the minimum frequency of backups. The maximum amount of time, following a disaster, for an organization to recover files, from backup storage and resume normal operations is known as recovery time objective. These measurements help administrators to select and set up suitable disaster recovery strategies, technologies.

Control Measures

This includes the steps to eliminate various threats to a company. Information technology disaster recovery control methods can be classified into three

Preventive measures: This involves the measures taken to prevent an event from happening. 

Detective measures which involves detecting of unwanted events and corrective measures that involves the efforts of controlling the system restore after a disaster.   

Strategies

A disaster recovery planner first learns an organization's business continuity plan, which should include the recovery point objective and recovery time objective for various business processes. Incomplete RTOs and RPOs cannot help in an efficient disaster management plan. After mapping the RTO and RPO metrics to the IT infrastructure, the disaster recovery planner determines the most suitable recovery strategy for the systems. Past years have seen the use of cutover or switch over recovery systems. This was time-consuming and expensive. So, with the advent of technology, cloud-based systems were introduced. 

• Some of the most common strategies for data protection are given below.

• backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals

• backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk

• replication of data to an off-site location, often making use of storage area network (SAN) technology

• Private Cloud solutions which replicate the management data. These management data can be restored once a disaster occurs.

• Imitating both on-site and to off-site data centers via Hybrid Cloud solutions, where servers can be brought up in the cloud data center, during an event of the disaster.

• Use of high availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data, even after a disaster.