
DISASTER RECOVERY
How modern data protection solutions ease DR planning
What is Disaster Recovery Plan and why we need it nowadays?
The main purpose of IT is the quick and effective processing of information. Data drives the business. You use many devices where your data is stored and processed. Cloud environments, local servers, endpoint devices. Any interruption in the functioning of the infrastructure can lead to very serious consequences. Disaster recovery stands for rules and procedures implemented after the occurrence of a disaster both natural and man-made, to restore the full functionality of your IT infrastructure. Its representation is an information technology disaster recovery plan (IT DRP).
A disaster recovery plan is a very important part of business continuity. Not having it can lead your business or your clients to serious financial problems or loss of reputation. On average, businesses lose over $100,000 per ransomware incident due to downtime and recovery costs. (source: CNN)
4 steps in DR planning

1. Identification
Identify disaster risks and business critical applications, documents, and resources. You should identify and assess the risks to your organization. This step should include items related to natural disasters, man-made emergencies and technological incidents. This will help you or the DRP development team to define the strategies and resources needed for disaster recovery within predetermined and acceptable timescales.
The organization must evaluate its business processes to determine which are critical to the organization’s activities. The plan should focus on short-term survival, such as generating cash flow and revenue, rather than a long-term solution to restore the organisation’s full operational capability.

2. Estimation
We define the key parameters that are key to maintaining business continuity. We use here the RTO (Recovery Time Object) metric, i.e. the time after which critical services must work. The shorter the time, the higher the costs of maintaining the backup infrastructure, but also the greater the stability of business operations.
The second value is RPO (Recovery Point Object), which determines what data is crucial to restore, so that the company does not lose operation (or how much data we may lose). It is worth noting that maintaining systems that backup all data is extremely expensive and often technically difficult.

3. Protection
We recommend a 3-2-1 backup strategy. It means having at least three copies of your data (or business critical data), two of which are local but on different media, and at least one offsite copy.
Data backup and recovery should be an integral part of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Developing a data backup strategy begins with determining what data to copy, selecting and implementing hardware and software backup procedures, scheduling and performing backups, and periodically validating data to ensure that it is properly stored.

4. Testing
46% of small businesses have never tested their BDR plan – according to Riverbank’s Annual BDR Survey
Testing disaster recovery should be a formal, scheduled process. During it, we check whether the adopted DRP will work when it is really needed. An executable “test plan” is an essential part of the testing process, along with the execution of actual tests and the analysis of related results. Disaster recovery plans will quickly lose value and meaning if not tested regularly.
Disaster Recovery questions
A disaster can happen anytime, anywhere. This can be common disk sector damage, but also the destruction of the entire infrastructure. So the consequences can be serious. One can paralyze a critical server or shut down several entire data centers. When preparing for disaster recovery, consider the worst-case scenario. In other words, you need to be prepared to be able to recover data in the same efficient manner regardless of the type of disaster that affects a company. In most cases, you can’t predict it, but you can prepare to minimize the damage it can cause to business and recover your key data (basic functionality). You must find the answers to the following questions:
- If something happens, how long will it take to recover my business data?
- How will this affect my business in the future?
- How to resume operation after disaster recovery?
- How much does it cost me to not have access to my critical data for some time?
Disaster Recovery Solutions for Businesses
Storware is a data protection software company. Storware solutions can be used for data backup and recovery of virtual machines, containers and cloud environments, as well as to protect SaaS application – Microsoft Office 365 data – OneDrive for Business SharePoint and Exchange Online.
Disaster Recovery Solutions
Storware develops a first-class data protection solution to help organizations maintain business continuity for cloud and virtual environments and endpoints. Learn more.