- Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning, focusing on restoring critical business functions after a disruptive event.
- Prevention, anticipation, and mitigation are crucial for organisations to proactively manage risks, predict potential disasters, and respond effectively to minimise business disruption.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, organisations face a myriad of threats that can disrupt operations and cause significant losses. Disaster recovery plays a pivotal role in minimising downtime and safeguarding critical data. By focusing on swift restoration of IT infrastructure and business functions, organisations can maintain operations and protect their brand reputation during and after a disaster.
What is disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning that focuses specifically on the restoration of critical business functions following a disruptive event. It encompasses strategies and processes designed to help organisations recover and restore their IT infrastructure, data, and operations to pre-disaster conditions as quickly as possible.
Also read: What is cloud backup and recovery?
Why is disaster recovery crucial？
Disaster recovery is essential for organisations as it plays a pivotal role in minimising downtime and data loss. By ensuring swift recovery, businesses can maintain their operations both during and after a disaster, thereby safeguarding their brand reputation and customer trust. Additionally, disaster recovery helps organisations comply with legal and regulatory requirements, reinforcing their commitment to responsible and resilient business practices.
Also read: Cloud backup: What are the advantages?
How does disaster recovery work?
Disaster recovery focuses on swiftly restoring critical applications and services within minutes of an outage. Organisations typically address the following three components to ensure effective disaster recovery:
1. Prevention
To minimise the likelihood of a technology-related disaster, businesses need a proactive plan that ensures all key systems are as reliable and secure as possible. While humans cannot control natural disasters, they can take preventative measures against network issues, security risks, and human errors. This involves setting up the appropriate tools and techniques to prevent disasters. For instance, deploying system-testing software that automatically checks all new configuration files before implementation can prevent configuration mistakes and failures.
2. Anticipation
Anticipation involves predicting possible future disasters, understanding the potential consequences, and planning appropriate disaster recovery procedures. Although predicting exact scenarios can be challenging, organisations can develop a disaster recovery solution by learning from past experiences and conducting thorough analyses. An example of this is backing up all critical business data to the cloud in anticipation of future hardware failures of on-premises devices, which is a practical approach to data management.
3. Mitigation
Mitigation is the response strategy a business adopts after a disaster occurs. The aim is to reduce the negative impact on normal business procedures. All key stakeholders should be aware of the steps to take in the event of a disaster, including:
Updating documentation: Ensuring that all relevant documentation is up-to-date and accessible.
Regular testing: Conducting regular disaster recovery testing to validate the effectiveness of the recovery plan.
Manual procedures: Identifying manual operating procedures to be followed in the event of an outage.
Coordination: Coordinating the disaster recovery strategy with all necessary personnel to ensure a cohesive response.
