What Is Disaster Recovery Planning?

How quickly would your business recover from an incident that deprived it of access to critical hardware or software? In the event of an incident, how many of the business’s operations could continue without disruption? Disaster recovery planning provides answers to these questions and helps to ensure that they are good answers.

As we have discussed in previous articles, Disaster recovery systems like Steadfast’s cloud DRaaS service empower businesses to replicate key infrastructure and software in a secure location. In the event of data loss or hardware downtime, operations are switched to redundant infrastructure, minimizing disruption.

Disaster Recovery planning is all about making sure that process runs smoothly and that it provides the operational redundancy that a business needs.

An effective disaster recovery platform depends on planning and execution in advance of any disaster.

What Should Be Replicated?

Modern businesses depend on a complex mix of software and hardware, often running on heterogeneous infrastructure that has been deployed over the life of the business.

Without an understanding of the hardware and software the business depends on, disaster recovery is impossible. Therefore, the first stage of any disaster recovery plan is an assessment of business operations and the infrastructure they depend on.

Understanding DR Goals

Once a business understands which systems should be included in a disaster recovery plan, it’s time to think about objectives for disaster recovery. Disaster recovery and business continuity experts think in terms of two key objectives:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RPO captures how much data a business can afford to lose before it impacts business operations. For example, could your business function if it lost access to data generated in the last day? For modern businesses, the RPO is measured in hours or minutes. Their disaster recovery systems should provide access to data generated as close in time to the incident as possible. In practice, that requires real time continuous data backups to the offsite location.

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RTO specifies how quickly DR systems and backed-up data should be available after a disaster occurs. For example, if a business can’t access its archival and data cold storage infrastructure, business operations may be able to continue without serious disruption for several days. But if access to key databases, applications, and servers is disrupted, it can have an immediate effect measured in dollars lost for every second of downtime.

A key benefit of our Disaster Recovery as a Service platform is short RPO and RTO at a lower price point, bringing world-class Disaster Recovery within reach of most businesses.

Disaster Recovery Implementation

So far we’ve looked at what should be replicated and disaster recovery goals. The next phase is to select infrastructure and service options capable of implementing the DR plan within budget.

In the past, this would be the point at which businesses purchased and deployed redundant servers and hired employees to manage them and build robust disaster recovery systems.

In 2018, there is another option: data can be backed up to cloud storage and servers can be replicated and launched onto a cloud platform in minutes. Cloud DR slashes the cost of disaster recovery and business continuity while ensuring that redundant infrastructure is ready to go at a moment’s notice.