Disaster Recovery
Importance of Disaster Recovery
Technology plays an increasingly significant role in every aspect of business, with applications and services enabling businesses to become more agile, available, and connected. Disasters can inflict damage with varying levels of severity, depending on the cenario. A system breakdown or unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for those who rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep systems running smoothly.
​
Every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event which halts day-to-day operations, no matter what industry or size. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage that can lead to lost customers and revenue.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to a business's ability to restore access and functionality to infrastructure after a disaster event. Disasters can interrupt service and cause data loss at any time without warning - your network could have an outage, a bug could get released, or your business might have to weather a natural disaster. To prepare for potential outages or data loss, an in-depth analysis of a business's IT infrastructure and the creation of a disaster recovery plan is necessary.
Benefits of Disaster Recovery
Stronger Business Continuity
Every second counts when your business goes offline, impacting productivity, customer experience, and your company's reputation. Disaster recovery helps safeguard critical business operations by ensuring they can recover with minimal or no interruption.
Enhanced Security
Disaster recovery plans use data backup and other procedures that strengthen your security posture and limit the impact of attacks and other security risks.
Faster Recovery
Disaster recovery solutions make restoring data and workloads easier so you can get business operations back online quickly after a catastrophic event. Disaster recovery plans leverage data replication and often rely on automated recovery to minimise downtime and data loss.
Reduced Recovery Costs
The monetary impacts of a disaster event can be significant, ranging from loss of business and productivity to data privacy penalties. With disaster recovery, businesses can avoid or minimise some of these costs.
High Availability
Many cloud-based services come with high availability features that can support your disaster recovery strategy. High availability capabilities help ensure an agreed level of performance and offer
built-in redundancy and automatic failover, protecting data against equipment failure and other smaller-scale events which may impact data availability.
Better Compliance
Disaster recovery planning supports compliance requirements by considering potential risks and defining a set of specific procedures and protections for your data and workloads in the event of a disaster. This usually includes strong data backup practices, disaster recovery sites, and regular testing to ensure that your business is prepared.
How Does Disaster Recovery Work?
Disaster recovery relies on having a solid plan to get critical applications and infrastructure up and running after an outage. Ideally within minutes.
​
Effective disaster recovery plans seek to address three different elements for recovery:
Typically, disaster recovery involves securely replicating and backing up data and workloads to a secondary location or multiple locations, known as disaster and recovery sites. These sites can be used to recover data from the most recent backup or a previous point in time. Organisations can also switch to using a disaster recovery site if the primary location and its systems fail due to an unforeseen event until the primary one is restored.