Building a Robust Disaster Recovery Strategy

As cyberattacks and natural disasters grow more frequent and severe, disaster recovery is essential to help prevent significant damage to business operations, finances, and reputation.

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Overview

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?

Modern digital businesses need robust disaster recovery plans to bounce back from cyberattacks, natural disasters, or unforeseen events – and to provide their organizations with data protections, minimal financial loss, reputation preservation, and strong customer trust.

In such highly connected, digital environments, downtime can be exorbitantly expensive. Some reports estimate the average cost of downtime at $9,000 per minute for larger organizations and up to $5 million per hour for certain industries and specific scenarios. More than half (54%) of the respondents to the Uptime Institute data center survey reported that their most recent “significant, serious, or severe outage” cost more than $100,000, with 16% saying their most recent outage cost more than $1 million. And according to IDC’s Worldwide State of Data Protection & DR Survey, the most common consequence of data disruption is employee overtime, which affects 45% of organizations. Another 40% reported losing employee productivity due to incidents, and 35% incurred direct revenue loss as a result of outages – and 35% permanently lost data.

These and many other outcomes are simply unacceptable and put an imperative upon every business to build a robust disaster recovery strategy.

crafting a plan

Crafting the Right Disaster Recovery Plan

Most businesses have some form of a disaster recovery plan in place in the event of a disaster, whether it be a manmade cyberattack or a natural event such as a hurricane. But that doesn’t mean the plans they have can appropriately protect assets and restore operations in today’s digital world.

Compared to just 10 years ago, disaster recovery is more cloud-based with a focus on continuous business rather than just data recovery. With a greater emphasis on automation and faster recovery times, disaster recovery today must account for the widespread adoption of cloud infrastructure and increasingly complex IT systems. In the past, physical backups and secondary data centers played a larger role in disaster recovery, but today businesses rely heavily on cloud services for data storage, replication, and rapid recovery.

Here are the critical steps needed to create a disaster recovery plan to protect the business:

• Identify critical data: Take an inventory of your systems, applications, and data considered most critical to your business operations. Prioritize the assets by recovery times in case of a disaster.

• Establish RTO and RPO: Determine your acceptable recovery time objective (how quickly systems need to be restored) and recovery point objective (how much data loss is tolerable) based on impact to the business.

• Configure backup storage policies: Create a disaster recovery storage policy, which details how to store your backups separately. Policies also can include features such as write-once-read-many (WORM) protections to prevent accidental deletion.

• Establish replication: Continuously or periodically copy critical data to a secondary site, enabling rapid recovery in case of a primary site failure. Synchronize systems and data between the production and recovery sites to safeguard against data loss.

• Develop recovery procedures: Document detailed steps for restoring data and systems from your disaster recovery backups, including required hardware, network configurations, and application-specific restoration procedures.

• Assign roles and responsibilities: Identify the personnel within your IT team who will be responsible for maintaining, initiating, and managing the disaster recovery process. Whether it be a CIO, a disaster recovery team leader, a crisis coordinator, or a senior IT manager, the team leader is responsible for making strategic decisions and managing the overall recovery process. A disaster recovery team also typically includes members across IT domains such as IT, operations, continuous business, and risk management.

• Conduct regular testing: Plan periodic tests and drills of your disaster recovery plan by performing partial or full restores from your backups to verify data integrity and identify any issues that would detract from a speedy, accurate recovery.

• Update your disaster recovery plan: Regularly review the plan and update it as needed to adjust for any necessary changes.

Operating without a disaster recovery plan is not an option. By accounting for these steps, business leaders can rest a little easier in the face of inevitable cyberattacks or system failures.

dr rewards

Reap the DR Rewards

With a formal strategy detailing how to respond in the event of a disaster, businesses will enjoy several benefits, ranging from minimized downtime and a more secure environment to better compliance and streamlined operations.

Key among the benefits is minimized downtime or even no downtime. The right plan can keep critical businesses operating with minimal or no interruption. Following on that, disaster recovery best practices also can help businesses reduce costs by avoiding the financial impact of downtime or a disaster.

Improved security also naturally comes with a disaster recovery plan. For instance, an organization can strengthen its security posture and ultimately limit the impact of attacks and other security risks. Improved compliance and reduced data loss are also key benefits as businesses define protections for data and workloads and minimize the amount of data lost during a disaster.

Disaster recovery promises many benefits – some expected and some that can be a happy surprise. For instance, the process of creating a disaster recovery plan often involves reviewing and updating existing IT infrastructure, leading to potential improvements in system performance and reliability during normal business operations. With streamlined IT operations, a disaster recovery plan can help identify unnecessary hardware and help reduce technical debt.

The process of creating the plan also helps the business identify and assess risk and vulnerabilities across the organization, and this can lead to an improved security posture overall. All of these benefits come together to improve the overall competitive advantage of a business because customers can be reassured the business is able to operate and serve customer needs even in the face of a disaster.

A robust disaster recovery plan removes the panic that comes with an unexpected crisis, and it does so much more. It manages expectations and puts the right people in place to handle the disaster. It helps meet legal and regulatory compliance demands as well as maintaining a positive public perception of the business. With a solid plan in place, organizations not only minimize the impact of cyberattacks and other disruptions, but they also can maintain continuous business operations and minimize worry about data loss or financial ruin.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of restoring an organization’s IT infrastructure and operations after a major disruption or disaster.

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Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR)?

“Business Continuity Disaster Recovery”, or “BCDR” for short, is used throughout the IT industry as a benchmark for organization resiliency in the face of unplanned disruptions.

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What is RTO and RPO?

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) are two important metrics used in disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

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