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Disaster Recovery

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is an organisation’s method of regaining access and functionality to its IT infrastructure after events like a hardware/software failure, a cyber attack, or even a natural disaster.
Disasters that affect your IT capabilities happen more often than you think, but only 6% are caused by a natural disaster. The vast majority of disasters that cause significant IT downtime are human error, hardware and software failure, and cyber attacks. There are even stories circulating that talk of how a newly hired IT technician inadvertently deleted all company data on his first day!
During the past three years, 93% of businesses have been hit by a natural or human-made disaster – and many of these organisations could not recover.
Whether your organisation is large or small, the only way to prepare for a disaster is to develop and exercise a disaster recovery plan.

What is a disaster recovery plan (DRP)?

An IT disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a written document that spells out the policies, step-by-step procedures, and responsibilities to recover an organisation’s IT systems and data and get IT operations back up and running when a disaster happens. This plan is a sub-component of the organisation’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
Once developed, the DR plan must be tested (or exercised) to ensure that the IT team can fully recover the organisation’s IT systems regardless of the type of disaster.
Disasters arrive unannounced, so it is essential to get an IT DR plan in place as soon as possible. A fully operational plan will help minimise risk exposure, reduce disruption, and ensure economic stability. It will also reduce insurance premiums and potential liability, and ensure your organisation complies with regulatory requirements. Most importantly, a well-executed plan can save your organisation thousands – even hundreds of thousands – of pounds in the event of a disaster.
Data is a valuable asset: Customer data; financial, human resource, and R&D documents; and emails are irreplaceable. Each document represents hours of work, and the ability to retrieve it is essential. To determine how much a disaster can cost your organisation, consider the cost of system downtime – the impact on employee productivity, the loss of billable hours, missed sales from a down e-commerce website, and penalties for failure to meet regulatory compliance obligations.
In a worst-case scenario, your DR plan may save your company.

What are the different types of disaster recovery plans?

There are four types of disaster recovery plans.

1. Virtualised disaster recover plan

With a virtual DR plan, your IT organisation replicates the entire IT infrastructure and stores it on an offsite Virtual Machine (VM). Since VMs are hardware independent, you do not need the same hardware as the primary site, so you can quickly back up your systems and data to dissimilar hardware. When a disaster happens, you can failover IT operations to the offsite VM and recover from a disaster in just a few minutes.

2. Network disaster recovery plan

A disaster recovery plan helps your IT team respond to an unplanned interruption of network services during a disaster, including voice, data, internet, etc. The plan must include procedures for recovering an organisation's network operations, including local area networks (LANs), wide-area networks (WANs), and wireless networks. An unplanned interruption of network services can range from performance degradation to a complete outage.

3. Data centre disaster recovery plan

This type of plan requires your organisation to set up a separate facility only used when a disaster happens. There are three primary types of disaster recovery data centres - cold, warm, and hot.

  • A cold DR site is an office or data centre located away from the primary site with power, heat, air conditioning, etc. but no running IT systems. Depending on the length of the disaster, an organisation may install the necessary systems after the disaster hits.
  • A warm DR site offers office space and a technology infrastructure used when a disaster hits the primary site. A warm site has power, heat, air conditioning, network connectivity, and redundant hardware/software already up and running. Back ups from the primary to the warm site are performed daily or weekly, which can result in some data loss.
  • A hot site offers office space and a complete replica of the primary site’s IT infrastructure, systems, applications, and up-to-date data. A hot site enables rapid recovery of all business processes. It is most expensive to maintain compared to other data centre types, but, for many businesses, it’s the most optimal solution.

    • 4. Cloud disaster recovery plan

    With this type of plan, your systems and data are backed up to a public cloud located at least 150 miles from the primary site. When a disaster happens, IT can easily failover their operations to the disaster recovery site and fail back to the same or new hardware – even if that hardware is dissimilar - to resume normal operations. Public cloud DR services are available pay-as-you-go and can be accessed from anywhere.

    The disaster recovery process

    Every business needs a disaster recovery plan unique to its data requirements. To define the best approach for your business, you must weigh the value of your data, systems, and applications against the risk your organisation can afford to assume. When creating disaster recovery plans, be sure to include the following steps:
    1. Establish a planning group.
    2. Perform a risk assessment and define an acceptable Recovery Point
    3. Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
    4. Prepare an inventory of IT assets.
    5. Identify dependencies and establish priorities.
    6. Develop recovery strategies.
    7. Develop a communication plan.
    8. Develop documentation, verification criteria, procedures, and responsibilities.
    9. Test, test, test the plan.
    10. Implement the plan.
      Maintain the IT infrastructure.

    What are the five major elements of a disaster recovery plan?

    We’ve outlined the basic steps in disaster recovery planning. Now, let’s explore the five primary elements of a DR plan below.

    1. Assign a recovery management team

    A dedicated disaster recovery plan requires proper development, updates, and testing. It’s best to form a dedicated disaster recovery team to cover all of those. Ideally, the team should include managers and employees from all branches of your organisation.
    The team’s ultimate purpose is to design, develop, implement, test, and upgrade the DR plan to ensure you can recover core business services as quickly as possible following a disaster.
    Moreover, the DR team should assign specific roles for each team member and their contact details in the DR plan document. The plan should also identify the first contact point (a responsible individual) in the event of a disaster.
    Lastly, all company staff must have access to the detailed disaster recovery plan, know the disaster recovery processes, and understand their specific roles to cut down recovery time and quickly resume key operations after a disaster occurs.

    2. Identify potential disaster risks

    Organisations must identify potential data risks – human-made, due to natural disaster or cyber-attacks. Restoring important systems and business operations in a disaster can reduce downtime and minimise financial and reputational loss, which is critical to your company’s success.
    Once you’ve identified the potential risks applicable to your company, you can calculate the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Having a precise RPO and RTO lets you manage disaster recovery systems easier, thus leading to a smooth and rapid restoration

    3. Classify critical data, apps and resources

    The next step comprises your company’s critical systems – apps, data, documents, and resources. (buildings, machinery, onsite IT infrastructure, human and intellectual resources, etc.)
    The DRP should focus on successful contingency planning how to continue revenue generation and ensure cash flow as a short-term goal. In the mid-and-long term, the DRP must define how to get your entire system back up and running to resume normal operations.

    4. Outline and specify back up and offsite disaster recovery procedures

    You can rely on a Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to manage onsite and offsite coordination or use a robust disaster recovery solution to manage the process individually.
    In both cases, you should aim to present the disaster recovery plan strategies to all data-processing personnel, assign critical business operations, outline back up operations procedures, and determine internal recovery strategies for your primary business site and emergency response procedures for your offsite disaster recovery sites.
    (if you rely on a fully-equipped secondary site, you should also create an alternate hot site plan; if you rely on a mobile data centre, you should implement a mobile site setup plan).

    5. Test and polish the plan

    As your company grows, your DR risks and needs will also evolve. For example, if your company opens a new data centre, it should be reflected in your DRP as soon as possible.
    If you have more than one alternate site, it’s best to use full resiliency program management. Bringing all of your information services back up procedures under one umbrella will let you design an appropriate emergency response for your data processing operations, mitigate business continuity risks, and, ultimately, enable rapid recovery to resume normal operations in the event of power outages and natural disasters.
    Moreover, you will benefit from disaster recovery automation, which simplifies testing all technology recovery strategies. A tested disaster recovery plan ensures continuous innovation in line with the increased risk to your company data. Be it during power outages, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks, your organisation will be prepared to restore even complex business operations rapidly.

    Finding the right disaster recovery plan solution

    Implementing your DR plan means you’ll need to find a DR solution that fits your IT requirements and is realistic about managing and testing. Many SMBs now work with managed service providers (MSPs) who deliver and administer their IT needs – outsourcing the expense of that mission-critical expertise

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