IT Disaster Recovery – White Paper

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When an IT disaster strikes, it’s harder than it seems for businesses to bounce back, unless they have the reassurance of a disaster recovery plan (DRP). IT disaster recovery is a planned process that helps businesses and organizations address tech-related disasters.

Whether it’s a power outage, cyberattack, or a natural disaster: With disaster recovery, you can ensure your company can recover quickly and efficiently.

What is a disaster recovery plan?

In this digital age, a DRP has never been more vital to workplace efficiency. Without a plan put in place, you run the risk of losing your data or slowing down production.

As the world around us continues to rely on technology to store data, businesses need to learn how to combat these new challenges.

With the help of a recovery plan, you can ensure the restoration of your business data and always have a data backup plan if a disaster strikes.

Disaster Recovery

What to include in your disaster recovery plan

Company goals

Data Recovery Crew If you have any type of remote storage of physical documents, you’ll need to define your goals for all of the individual hardware and software inventory involved. A statement of goals will outline everything your organization will need to do before, during, and after a disaster. This will also include your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

RTO refers to the amount of downtime acceptable after a data break or outage.

RPO refers to the amount of data your company is willing to lose during a disaster.

For example, in your statement of goals, you’d simply mention you’re willing to lose 10% of your data and that you’d want to return to operation in 5 hours to ensure the outage won’t impact your business continuity.

Identify personnel roles

If a disaster occurs, someone needs to be in charge to streamline productivity and keep things moving. Your DRP will identify who is responsible for executing the disaster recovery plan. There will also be provisions if an individual is unavailable.

Hardware and software inventory

An inventory list will have all of your hardware and software assets listed. This list should also note which software and hardware are critical to the business.

IT Crew Recovering Information from Broken Hard Drive

The backup process

All of your data is different. Your disaster recovery plan will outline how your data resources are backed up, where they live, which devices they are on, and the folders they are in. This outline will ensure your team knows how to go about recovering each individual resource during the backup process.

Disaster response procedures

Lastly, follow disaster recovery best practices to ensure your plan includes restoration procedures. Your restoration procedures should be outlined so your business can recover after a loss of full system operations. The end goal is to get your business back up and running. Your restoration procedures will show every step and detail needed.

There is no one size fits all DRP plan for each type of disaster you could face.

You’ll need to outline a step-by-step guide to help your business tackle these different disasters.

This includes ransomware, cyberattacks, natural disasters, data loss, and power outages.

With a well-thought-out plan for each type of disaster, you’ll improve workplace efficiency, know what you need to respond to a disaster, and protect your business IT infrastructure.

IT Crew Working on a Hard drive

Best disaster response processes to consider

Data backup

Backing up your data is one of the easiest forms of disaster recovery. You’ll need to store data offsite, in the cloud, or on a hardware device.

You should have a regular cadence for backing up your data.

Disaster recovery as a service

This means your business operations, software, and hardware are with an off-premise cloud. With disaster recovery as a service, you can rest assured your company can carry on with…

…day-to-day operations, even if your on-premise servers are down.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a great tool you can add to your disaster recovery plan to ensure your company is safe during a natural disaster. With this method, your data is located on an offsite virtual machine.

This ensures you can recover quickly if disaster strikes.

Cloud Server

Strategies for your disaster recovery plan

On-premise recovery

Your in-house IT team sets up a disaster recovery plan for all of your software, hardware, systems, and data.

This requires an IT system for all of the tech your company has.

This also means if one single component fails, your entire system could be at risk of failing.

Data recovery and restoration

For hardware and systems that cannot tolerate downtime, you can consider actual parallel computing, data mirroring, or multiple data center synchronization. These are higher-cost data recovery solutions.

The most cost-effective alternative would be to use a cloud backup.

Internal recovery

Storing data at multiple facilities can help ensure that if a problem occurs, not all of your data would be at risk. Your company would need to configure your applications to ensure they can all work together cohesively from one data center to another data center.

Of course, this can be a more expensive strategy.

Cloud-based

With cloud-based recovery, the cloud hosts and manages all of your vital services and data streams. This ensures you have access to all the information whenever you need it.

Your data will be monitored to detect outages, malware threats, and other cybersecurity errors.

Learn more about Disaster Recovery with Next Horizon

Prevention is key when it comes to technology. Don’t wait until it’s too late. You’ve worked hard to build your business to where it is today, to watch it disappear in minutes.