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Disaster Recovery Solutions

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What Is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is an organizational planning process that helps companies proactively map out the steps they would need to take to recover from a disruptive event that impacts their technology systems. Such disruptive events could include natural disasters, cyber or physical security incidents, and power outages. A disaster recovery plan outlines the processes and steps that the organization would take, following such an event, to resume normal business operations.

Having a robust and detailed disaster recovery plan is crucial for minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity when major adverse events occur. However, implementing an effective enterprise disaster recovery plan involves more than data backup.

Comprehensive solutions require multiple, integrated components for protection and the ability to rapidly restore systems in the aftermath of an outage or disruptive event.

This is part of an extensive series of guides about data breach.

Key Components of Holistic Disaster Recovery

An end-to-end disaster recovery solution includes various capabilities that work in unison:

  • Backup and Replication: Performing regular backups and replicating data to secondary sites or cloud infrastructure provides a foundation for restoring systems after an incident. A recovery point objectives (RPOs) — a term of measurement for the maximum amount of data that the organization can acceptably lose — must be defined to ensure minimal data loss.
  • Secondary Infrastructure:  Maintaining secondary infrastructure environments, whether it’s a dedicated recovery facility or cloud-based, gives IT the necessary resources it needs to restore data if primary infrastructure is damaged or interrupted.
  • Emergency Procedures: Documented runbooks, trained staff procedures, and emergency response workflows enable rapid assessment, triage, and initiation of recovery during disasters.
  • Redundancy – Building redundancy into infrastructure components limits single points of failure. Examples include redundant power, network paths, or high-availability server configurations.
  • Testing: Frequent disaster recovery testing validates that backup systems, procedures, and staff training are effective. Conducting tabletop exercises and live tests is essential for identifying gaps or weaknesses in the plan.

Orchestrating these capabilities together into a comprehensive system delivers optimal resilience for a wide range of disruptive events.

Major IT Disaster Scenarios to Safeguard Against

Robust disaster recovery solutions aim to protect organizations against various adverse scenarios including:

  • Natural disasters: Severe weather, fires, flooding, and geological events that can damage or destroy facilities housing critical IT infrastructure.
  • Power outages: Loss of power can severely disrupt operations across entire regions. Backup power and redundancy provide uptime.
  • Security incidents: Malware, ransomware or destructive cyberattacks can corrupt, encrypt, or completely destroy data and cripple systems.
  • Human error:  Accidental administrative errors by staff, such as deleting databases, can cause costly outages. Backups are key for recovering from these mistakes.
  • Hardware failure: Server, storage, and network device failures can abruptly take critical systems and infrastructure offline.
  • Data corruption – Software bugs, storage failures, or malicious tampering can corrupt application and data integrity.

Having comprehensive contingency plans and integrated solutions in place for each scenario minimizes disruptions and data loss when disasters inevitably strike.

Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery

Cloud computing has influenced disaster recovery practices by enabling easy replication of data, and even full system images, to external cloud environments.

  • Faster recovery: Cloud automation and snapshots accelerate restoring systems from backups compared to manual processes.
  • Greater resilience:  The global distribution of cloud environments mitigates the impact of regional outages.
  • Simplified Testing: Cloud-based recovery simplifies conducting comprehensive disaster recovery tests.
  • Flexible scalability: Cloud infrastructure can be quickly scaled on demand to handle surges in workload volume after primary outages.

Despite the advantages that cloud computing offers, organizations should still conduct planning for the orchestration of cloud-based disaster recovery alongside existing on-premises investments in facilities, hardware, IT skills, and processes.

Challenges of Enterprise Disaster Recovery

Architecting and executing an effective disaster recovery plan poses multiple challenges:

  • Complex coordination: Integrating various data protection, infrastructure, staff training, and other components into a unified, resilient system requires extensive upfront planning and design.
  • Maintaining staff readiness: Personnel should be regularly trained on emergency response processes to internalize business continuity plans.
  • Costs: Secondary sites, cloud capabilities, and redundancy incur substantial capital and ongoing operational expenses.
  • Testing difficulties – Conducting full and realistic disaster recovery testing is inherently disruptive to operational systems and difficult to perform comprehensively.
  • Adapting for change:  Backup and recovery systems must be regularly updated to adapt for changes in IT environments that include virtualization, cloud, containers, new applications, and other technologies.
  • Compliance pressures: Highly-regulated industries often face strict mandates and audits for disaster recovery protections and backups.

See how Imperva Site Failover can help you with disaster recovery.

See Our Additional Guides on Key Data Breach Topics

Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of data breach.

Data Protection

Authored by Cloudian

Advanced Threat Protection

Authored by Cynet

Cloud Security

Authored by Hackerone