Computer usage has increased by more than 1,000% over the last two decades and shows no sign of slowing down. This surge in digital reliance has made data protection essential. In a world where digital access is critical, time lost from a system crash can have catastrophic consequences for business processes, underscoring the importance of an effective disaster recovery process.
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Downtime can result in significant financial losses, with Gartner estimating that it costs the average company around $5,600 a minute. On top of that, downtime and data loss can spell disaster for the remote teams organizations work hard to support. A well-executed disaster recovery process can mitigate these risks, ensuring data restoration and operational continuity.
So, how do you recover from a disaster quickly and effectively? The better question is, how do you plan for it? An effective disaster recovery process involves strategic preparation, regular testing, and continuous improvement to minimize downtime and data loss. While disaster recovery isn’t an easy conversation, making wise investments now can prevent significant negative outcomes down the road.
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the benefits of disaster recovery plans, what they are, and what the future of disaster recovery looks like. But first, let’s get a little background on why every business needs a robust disaster recovery process in today’s digital age.
What is a disaster recovery plan?
A disaster recovery plan, or DRP, is a formal document created by an organisation that details how to respond to various types of disasters. This will typically include things like power outages, cyber-attacks, including ransomware, and a range of other disruptive events. The best DRPs go beyond simply restoring data that has been lost. Good plans aim for quick restorations to key systems like:
- Hardware infrastructure
- Software applications that may have been damaged
- HVAC and other key building access systems
Why is a disaster recovery plan important?
A disaster recovery plan is essential in keeping an organisation’s data accessible and protected. If a clear DRP isn’t in place, businesses leave themselves open to a number of threats, including:
- Lost revenue: Financial losses of some kind are inevitable when downtime occurs, but effective planning can reduce the impact significantly.
- Brand damage: One of the hardest things to recover from as a brand is bad publicity.
- Dissatisfied customers: Keeping customers happy should be your number one priority — if a customer can’t get what they need from you they will go elsewhere to get it.
Remember, the longer your recovery time after a disaster, the greater the impact to the company.
Benefits of a disaster recovery plan
For now, let’s focus on some of the benefits that your business can access by creating and implementing an effective DRP. These are wide-ranging and numerous, but the most significant include:
- Cost efficiency: This is where long-term implications outweigh short-term expenditures. It is more cost-effective for your business to mitigate against possible threats rather than accept the costs of prolonged downtime.
- Increased productivity: Part of a DRP includes regular checks of your entire system. Whether threats are detected or not, there is, at minimum, going to be some actionable insight gleaned from these exercises — insight that will lead to more efficient processes and inevitably increase productivity.
- Better customer retention: Your customers are your number one priority, and they aren’t going to stick around and wait for you to get it right. A single event could cause a significant loss of customers, but an effective DRP works to prevent this.
- Flexibilty: An effective plan gives ogranisations the agility they need to respond rapidly in the event of a disaster. On top of that, cloud-based solutions allow organisations to restore critical data and systems to any location.
Now that we know what a disaster recovery plan is and why they are so important to businesses, let’s look at how these plans are created.
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What should a disaster recovery plan include?
Whilst disaster recovery plans will inevitably vary from one organisation to another, there are 7 core phases to consider when you come to develop a plan for your organisation. These are:
- Vulnerability Assessment: You want to begin with a vulnerability assessment that will help you gauge where you are and outline what you may need moving forward.
- Organisational Impact Assessment: Also referred to as a business impact analysis, or BIA, this assessment is essentially a quantifying exercise into how well prepared your system currently is to withstand threats. This ends in an actionable insight report, personalised to your organisations’ needs.
- Defining: In this phase you need to outline the specifics (i.e. requirements and continuity, recovery plans and restoration goals)
- Subplans: This is where brainstorming comes into play. When considering what plans to implement, make sure they fit to the needs of your specific needs as these will vary.
- Create the DRP: Now the research is over, the budget has been considered and it is time to create your DRP, which includes any subplans created in phase 4 above.
- Testing: This phase fairly is self-explanatory, but it does include checks at regular intervals, whether a problem is detected or not.
- Maintenance: Once you’ve spent the time creating a comprehensive plan, regular maintenance of that plan will ensure you’re ready for future growth.
Now that you know how to create a plan and understand why one is needed, it’s time to carefully consider all of your options.
Introducing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
One such option is investing in a third-party service model known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This approach uses disaster recovery software to mirror your data and applications, either on-site or in a cloud-hosting platform, so they are easily available and accessible for data restoration following a disaster. In simple terms, this takes the form of a disaster recovery plan tailored to provide you and your organisation with peace of mind by significantly reducing the amount of downtime you experience when an unexpected disaster occurs. While it is an investment that deserves careful attention, it usually is administered as a service level agreement that offers pay-as-you-go options. Organisations that offer DRaaS services can be a great asset to smaller companies that have limited access to robust IT teams in-house. There are various benefits that come with DRaaS, but the most crucial to consider are:
- Rapid recovery: By agreeing on a rapid recovery time objective (RTO) before signing a service user agreement, you guarantee that your business will be backed up and running in a limited period when disaster strikes.
- Scalability: With DRaaS, you can continually review your needs and make changes whenever deemed necessary.
- Enhanced security: Disaster Recovery as a Service offers a secure infrastructure backup, especially when you work with providers who offer encrypted data storage.
- Cost-effectiveness: Set payments for DRaaS will vary in each unique agreement, but these solutions offer significant savings compared with attempting to create an in-house recovery infrastructure.
Types of disaster recovery plans
Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are essential for successful contingency planning and safeguarding critical business operations. Below are some common types:
Virtualized Disaster Recovery Plan
A virtualized disaster recovery plan ensures critical business operations are quickly restored using virtual machines. This approach reduces downtime and allows businesses to restore critical systems without needing identical physical hardware.
Network Disaster Recovery Plan
A network disaster recovery plan focuses on securing and restoring network infrastructure. It ensures connectivity for electronic data interchange and enterprise resource management, helping businesses maintain operations during outages.
Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan
A cloud disaster recovery plan leverages a service provider’s cloud to replicate and store critical data. This type of plan enables fast recovery and supports seamless disaster recovery procedures.
Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan
A data center disaster recovery plan prioritizes physical and digital asset protection within a data center. It incorporates information services backup procedures, robust disaster recovery strategies, and aligns with business continuity planning to ensure data security and operational continuity, even during unexpected disruptions.
DRaaS
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a scalable solution that integrates with IT disaster recovery plans, providing real-time replication and automated failover capabilities. This option ensures quick recovery of critical business operations.
How disaster recovery plan works
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a vital part of ensuring business continuity planning. It starts with assessing risks and identifying threats to critical business operations. This initial step allows businesses to outline potential vulnerabilities and determine the appropriate disaster recovery strategies to safeguard their operations.
The next phase involves creating a detailed plan, incorporating disaster recovery procedures to address a range of potential disruptions. This includes leveraging information services backup procedures to ensure all data is securely stored and easily accessible. For companies relying on digital transactions, integrating electronic data interchange and enterprise resource management into the plan ensures operational continuity.
Testing the plan is crucial. Regularly simulating recovery scenarios, such as activating disaster recovery sites or deploying a cloud disaster recovery plan, ensures businesses are prepared to handle actual emergencies. These tests help refine the disaster recovery process, guaranteeing that organizations can restore critical systems efficiently and effectively.
A comprehensive DRP should also define clear recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery timeframes, ensuring minimal data loss and downtime. For example, an IT disaster recovery plan might focus on recovering servers, databases, and applications, while a network-based plan could prioritize restoring connectivity to critical systems.
By following a structured and well-tested DRP, businesses can achieve successful contingency planning, maintain operational stability, and recover quickly from disruptions. The use of disaster recovery plan examples and templates can further streamline this process, providing businesses with actionable frameworks to address their unique needs.
From protecting data with cloud disaster recovery plans to ensuring rapid recovery through disaster recovery sites, a well-designed plan is the backbone of any organization’s resilience strategy. This approach not only safeguards critical operations but also helps build trust with stakeholders, ensuring long-term success.
Examples of a disaster recovery plan
- IT Disaster Recovery Plan: Includes measures to recover servers, databases, and applications during outages.
- Network Disaster Recovery Plan: Focuses on restoring connectivity after cyberattacks or equipment failure.
- Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan Examples: Ensures off-site backups and seamless access to data during disasters.
These disaster recovery plan examples highlight the importance of customized disaster recovery strategies for various scenarios.
Disaster recovery plan template
A disaster recovery plan template simplifies creating a structured plan. It typically includes:
- Business Continuity Planning sections to ensure minimal disruption to operations.
- Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) for restoring data and systems quickly.
- Disaster Recovery Procedures for immediate response and recovery actions.
- Details on disaster recovery sites and assigned roles for successful contingency planning.
By using a comprehensive template, businesses can ensure they’re prepared for any emergency.
Get started with DRaaS
Disaster recovery is a perfect example of investing time, money, and resources now to avoid potentially disastrous consequences later on. Putting a plan together can however be a cumbersome and complex process. While DRaaS looks set to be the future of disaster recovery, it’s important to remember that poor decisions around DRaaS can also negatively impact your business. That’s why, to ensure DRaaS and disaster recovery work for you, you should consider consulting with professionals who can guide you through the decision-making process. Through partnerships such as these, you can develop a comprehensive business continuity plan you can rely on, and identify a DRaaS provider that truly meets your organisation’s specific requirements. Don’t wait until disaster strikes. Get in touch with Nexstor and start planning today!
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