Disaster recovery services are a critical component of a business’s ability to survive an IT disaster. A single disruption can cost a company in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention reputational damage and lost customer confidence. By implementing an effective disaster recovery plan, businesses can minimize downtime and increase the speed of recovering from a disaster. Technology solutions play a key role in the process, from conducting risk assessments to providing backup and recovery solutions and testing the plan.
A disaster recovery service provides a failover site in the event of an IT outage, natural disaster or cyber attack. The process involves backing up data and replicating applications and computer processing to a remote offsite location that is not affected by the disaster. When an outage occurs, computer processing can be restored to the offsite server so operations can continue normally.
An effective DR solution should be able to support strict availability requirements in virtual infrastructures and enable automated recovery orchestration to minimize downtime. The service should also have monitoring features that can detect and notify of issues in real-time, and provide alerts to ensure business continuity plans are in place.
Having the right Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place is crucial for a business, regardless of the industry or size. For example, a brief network outage may result in frustrated customers and some loss of revenue for an e-commerce company, while a hurricane or tornado could destroy a manufacturing plant or data center, potentially resulting in massive financial losses.
For larger organizations with more advanced IT needs, an internal DR site is often preferred. This typically involves setting up a second data center with hardware configuration, supporting equipment and staff, heating and cooling and layout design. Alternatively, some cloud-based vendors offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides a hot site on-demand by hosting your infrastructure backup on virtual servers in the cloud.
A successful DR plan requires the involvement of many stakeholders across an organization. An assigned team should be responsible for planning, implementing and managing the disaster recovery plan, and its associated processes, policies and procedures. The team should include representatives from all critical business units. This ensures the DR plan addresses their specific needs and helps to minimize business impact during an IT outage.
An effective DR plan should minimize dependence on physical hardware, reducing the need for expensive investments in a physical recovery site. For example, using a one-click DR solution like Druva’s, which backs up workloads on-premises and in the cloud to the same platform, eliminates the need for a hardware infrastructure and simplifies recovery. The solution also enables automatic failover to the cloud or to on-premises systems without manual intervention, eliminating complexities and eliminating recovery times.