Disaster Recovery Plan: What it is and How it Works

Although they happen more frequently than you may imagine, just 6% of IT disasters result from natural disasters. Human mistakes, cyberattacks, software or hardware issues. Even reports about how a freshly hired IT specialist accidentally erased all firm files on their first work day are spreading. 93% of companies have experienced a human or natural disaster in the last three years, and most enterprises have not been able to recover.

The only means to get ready for a crisis, regardless of how big or little your organization is, is to create and practice a disaster recovery plan.

An IT Disaster Mitigation Plan: What is it?

An organization's rules, procedures, as well as roles for recovering its IT systems and data and restoring IT operations in the event of a disaster are laid out in a written document known as an IT disaster recovery (DR) plan. This strategy is a part of the business continuity plan for the company (BCP). To ensure the IT team can properly recover the organization's IT systems regardless of the type of disaster, the DR plan must be tested (or exercised) after we have created it.

Disasters strike suddenly, so it's critical to have an IT DR plan in place as soon as you can. Your risk exposure will be reduced, there will be less disturbance, and there will be economic stability thanks to a well-executed plan. Additionally, it will save insurance costs, lower the possibility of liability, and guarantee that your company complies with legal standards. Most significantly, a well-structured plan can prevent a crisis from costing your company a lot of money.

Consider the cost of system downtime, the impact on staff productivity, the loss of billable hours, missed sales resulting from the downtime of the website, and penalties for failing to satisfy regulatory compliance duties to get an idea of how much a disaster can cost your business. Customer data, human resources, financial and research documents, emails, and other data types are all significant assets.

Disaster Recovery Plan Types

Virtualized Disaster Recovery Plan

IT department stores a duplicate of the whole infrastructure on another virtual machine as part of a virtual disaster recovery plan (VM). The original hardware is not needed since the company would employ virtual machines (VMs); thus, you can quickly back up your systems and data to different hardware. When a disaster hits, you can failover IT functions to the remote VM and recover from a disaster in only a few minutes.

Plan for Network Disaster Recovery

A network disaster recovery plan aids the companies' IT staff in responding to an unexpected loss of network services, such as phone, data, and internet, during a disaster. Procedures for restoring an organization's network activities, including those on LANs, WANs, and wireless networks, must be included in the strategy. Network services can be unexpectedly interrupted in a variety of ways, from performance deterioration to the total outage.

Disaster Recovery for the Cloud

Your data and systems are backed up with this kind of plan to a public cloud that is more than 150 - 200 miles away from the main site. Even if the hardware is different, IT may easily failover operations to the backup site in the event of a disaster and failback to it. Pay-as-you-go public cloud DR services are accessible from anywhere and are provided on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Disaster Recovery Plan for Data Center

Your company must build a different facility just for disasters as part of this type of plan. Disaster recovery strategies for data centers come in three flavors: hot, cold, and warm.

Steps in a Disaster Recovery Plan

Each company should have a disaster mitigation plan that is distinct from the data it needs. You must compare the usefulness of the data you have, applications, and systems to the risk your firm can bear to determine the best course of action. Include these measures in your disaster recovery plan:

● Create a planning team.
● Create appropriate Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives after conducting a risk assessment (RTOs).
● Make an inventory of your IT resources.
● Establish priorities and list dependents.
● Create plans for restoration.
● Create a communication strategy.
● Create documentation, standards for verification, processes, and roles.
● Test the plan repeatedly.
● Execute the plan.
● Upkeep the network infrastructure.

Testing Your Emergency Response Strategy

You must test your disaster recovery plan and make sure that all the necessary components are in place for a successful test. This entails having a thorough script of the test's actions, making sure that all IT components are set up and ready to use, documenting the test's progress, and putting together an after-action review for the post-DR test.

Selecting the Ideal DR Solution

Finding a disaster recovery solution that satisfies your IT needs and is practical in terms of managing and testing is necessary to implement your disaster recovery strategy. Nowadays, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) outsource the cost of their mission-critical IT expertise to managed service providers (MSPs), who deliver and manage their IT needs. Numerous MSPs provide managed disaster recovery services based on Acronis' disaster recovery software. This is because, with Acronis, an MSP can quickly add disaster recovery to your backup. As a result, not only will you have backups that secure your data, applications, and systems, but you will also be able to quickly spin up your IT systems in the cloud in an emergency.

Cyber Disaster Recovery gives you control if your company wishes to keep IT management in-house by assuring business continuity with quick failover of crucial workloads to the cloud. Your systems now have immediate data accessibility, strengthening your infrastructure and enabling your team to keep working effectively in the face of any crisis.