Disaster Recovery
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a disaster? Tsunami? Fire? Flooding? Cyber-attack?
The world is unpredictable, as COVID and, more recently, the Russia/Ukraine crisis has shown. Whether your business is large or small, disaster could strike at any time, and it is impossible to predict when disaster could strike.
Disaster recovery (DR) is an area of security planning that aims to protect an organisation from the effects of significant adverse events. DR allows an organisation to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster.
Essential questions to ask when you plan and design your mission-critical hosting infrastructure include:
- What is your Recovery Time Objective?
- How likely is this scenario?
- How will this disaster impact my business?
- Who is part of the plan?
- What data is the most critical?
All businesses in the 21st century are reliant on reliable technology. Consequently, any disruption will result in business disruption, loss of productivity and even impacts on motivation amongst staff and customers. Additionally, you will likely experience a loss of revenue if there is an outage for an extended length of time.
In the event of a disaster. Is your business capable of being up and running within a short time after?
The main purpose of a disaster recovery plan is to restore all IT assets and enable business continuity quickly. However, a successful disaster recovery requires planning to carry out the necessary steps.
Disaster recovery plans should routinely be updated for any new staff members, hardware, or office expansions, as well as routinely tested to ensure everyone knows their role in recovery. This is important to provide clarity and accountability.
A critical area is for business owners to be fully aware of the timeline for recovery following a disaster.
An effective disaster recovery plan provides you with time measurements using two different objectives (1) Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and (2) Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – Defines how far back into data resources your business must recover to resume daily operations after a disaster. The RPO determines how frequent data must be backed up to ensure you are up and running again in the shortest time possible.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – Determines the maximum amount of time your business can survive an outage before you begin to suffer financial loss from a lack of critical business functions in addition to client and customer loss. The RTO helps you define how much time you need to restore daily business operations.
The RPO and RTO are an essential part of disaster recovery planning and the technologies, strategies, and procedures your business will require for successful and rapid restoration. This requires the careful positioning of secondary data to ensure fast access and technologies that quickly bring data live from a backup appliance.
Please contact our team if you have any questions or require more information regarding your Disaster Recovery.
