What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery (DR) consists of IT technologies and best practices designed to prevent or minimize data loss and business disruption resulting from catastrophic events—everything from equipment failures and localized power outages to cyberattacks, civil emergencies, criminal or military attacks, and natural disasters.
Many businesses—especially small- and mid-sized organizations—neglect to develop a reliable, practicable disaster recovery plan. Without such a plan, they have little protection from the impact of significantly disruptive events.
How Does Disaster Recovery Work?
Disaster recovery relies upon the replication of data and computer processing in an off-premises location not affected by the disaster. When servers go down because of a natural disaster, equipment failure or cyber attack, a business needs to recover lost data from a second location where the data is backed up. Ideally, an organization can transfer its computer processing to that remote location as well in order to continue operations.
Why is disaster recovery important?
A disaster is an unexpected problem resulting in a slowdown, interruption, or network outage in an IT system. Outages come in many forms, including the following examples:
- An earthquake or fire
- Technology failures
- System incompatibilities
- Simple human error
- Intentional unauthorized access by third parties
These disasters disrupt business operations, cause customer service problems, and result in revenue loss. A disaster recovery plan helps organizations respond promptly to disruptive events and provides key benefits.
Disaster Recovery Plan Defined
You might not be able to prevent disasters from happening, but with a solid disaster recovery plan in place, you can be ready for them when they hit and ensure the least amount of impact to your business. Tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, fire, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, cyber attacks; a good DR plan should account for as many potential disasters as possible and lay out clear tactics that ensure critical systems are not only protected but kept online and that revenue loss is kept to an absolute minimum.
5 Top Elements of an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan
- Disaster recovery team: This assigned group of specialists will be responsible for creating, implementing and managing the disaster recovery plan. This plan should define each team member’s role and responsibilities. In the event of a disaster, the recovery team should know how to communicate with each other, employees, vendors, and customers.
- Risk evaluation: Assess potential hazards that put your organization at risk. Depending on the type of event, strategize what measures and resources will be needed to resume business. For example, in the event of a cyber attack, what data protection measures will the recovery team have in place to respond?
- Business-critical asset identification: A good disaster recovery plan includes documentation of which systems, applications, data, and other resources are most critical for business continuity, as well as the necessary steps to recover data.
- Backups: Determine what needs backup (or to be relocated), who should perform backups, and how backups will be implemented. Include a recovery point objective (RPO) that states the frequency of backups and a recovery time objective (RTO) that defines the maximum amount of downtime allowable after a disaster. These metrics create limits to guide the choice of IT strategy, processes and procedures that make up an organization’s disaster recovery plan. The amount of downtime an organization can handle and how frequently the organization backs up its data will inform the disaster recovery strategy.
- Testing and optimization: The recovery team should continually test and update its strategy to address ever-evolving threats and business needs. By continually ensuring that a company is ready to face the worst-case scenarios in disaster situations, it can successfully navigate such challenges. In planning how to respond to a cyber attack, for example, it’s important that organizations continually test and optimize their security and data protection strategies and have protective measures in place to detect potential security breaches.
Disaster Recovery
Without a disaster recovery plan in place, you are simply left to cope with the disaster and the catastrophic fallout this can have on your business. From losing critical systems to flood or fire to falling victim to a crippling cyber attack, a disaster can strike any any moment and often without any warning.
What Are the Benefits of Disaster Recovery Software?
No organization can afford to ignore disaster recovery. The two most important benefits of having a disaster plan in place, including effective DR software, are:
- Cost savings: Planning for potential disruptive events can save businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars and even mean the difference between a company surviving a natural disaster or folding.
- Faster recovery: Depending on the disaster recovery strategy and the types of disaster recovery tools used, businesses can get up and running much faster after a disaster, or even continue operations as if nothing had happened.
Protect Your Data with ActivEdge Data Loss Prevention Solution Suite
Ensure your organization’s sensitive data is safe at all times, whether in use, in motion, or at rest. ActivEdge’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution provides a comprehensive suite of advanced features to safeguard against data breaches and maintain regulatory compliance.
With ActivEdge DLP, you can:
- Dynamically protect sensitive data across all endpoints, applications, and networks.
- Prevent data loss through advanced data discovery, classification, and policy enforcement.
- Gain complete visibility into data activity and user behavior.
- Simplify compliance with industry regulations and data privacy laws.
ActivEdge DLP offers a range of benefits for your organization:
- Reduced risk of data breaches: Protect your sensitive information from unauthorized access, exfiltration, and loss.
- Improved data security posture: Gain comprehensive visibility and control over your data.
- Enhanced compliance: Meet industry regulations and data privacy laws with confidence.
- Increased productivity: Streamline data security processes and reduce administrative overhead.
Contact ActivEdge today for a free consultation.