Disaster recovery

What is disaster recovery?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented, structured approach with instructions for responding to unplanned incidents. It includes a detailed plan for recovering IT infrastructure, applications, and data.

A disaster recovery plan should include:

• Risk assessment and business impact analysis
• Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs)
• Detailed recovery procedures
• Roles and responsibilities
• A disaster recovery communication plan
• A combination of disaster recovery and backup solutions
• Testing and updates

A disaster recovery plan ensures:

• Business continuity so that critical business functions can continue during and after a disaster
• Data protection to safeguard important data from being lost or corrupted
• Minimal downtime to reduce the time it takes to restore normal operations, minimizing financial and reputational impact
• Compliance to meet regulatory requirements for data protection and business continuity
• Preparedness for a structured response to disasters, reducing panic and confusion during an actual event.

A DRP is an essential component of an organization's risk management strategy, ensuring that it can quickly recover from disruptions and maintain business continuity in the face of unforeseen events.

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, helps organizations with disaster recovery capabilities to protect their data and applications from disruptions:

Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Zerto continuously replicates data from production environments to a secondary site in real-time. This ensures that the replicated data is always up-to-date, minimizing data loss in the event of a disaster.

Journal-Based Recovery: Zerto keeps a journal of recovery points created seconds apart for all protected virtual machines. This journal allows organizations to recover data from any point in time within the journal’s retention period. This capability is crucial for recovering from disasters to point seconds before data was first compromised.

Application and VM Consistency: Zerto is capable of creating consistent recovery points across multiple virtual machines and applications. This ensures that all components of an application are recovered to the same point in time, maintaining data integrity and application consistency.

Automated Failover and Failback: Zerto automates the failover process, enabling quick and predictable recovery of services to a secondary site. Similarly, it automates the failback process, allowing organizations to revert operations back to the primary site once the issue is resolved.

Non-Disruptive Testing: Zerto allows organizations to test their disaster recovery plans without impacting the production environment. This non-disruptive testing ensures that DR plans are effective and that personnel are familiar with the recovery procedures.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Support: Zerto supports replication to and from various environments, including on-premises data centers, public clouds (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), and hybrid cloud configurations. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the best DR strategy for their needs.

Scalability: Zerto is designed to scale with the growth of an organization. It can protect a small number of virtual machines or scale to protect thousands of VMs across multiple sites and clouds.

Orchestration and Automation: Zerto includes orchestration and automation features that streamline the recovery process. Organizations can define recovery plans that specify the order of recovery for virtual machines, network configurations, and other necessary steps.

Analytics and Reporting: Zerto provides advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, giving organizations visibility into their disaster recovery readiness, replication performance, and resource utilization. These insights help in optimizing DR strategies and ensuring compliance with internal and external requirements.

Compliance and Audit: Zerto helps organizations meet compliance requirements by providing detailed logs and reports of DR activities, including failover tests and actual failovers. These logs are useful for audits and ensuring adherence to regulatory standards.

Ransomware Recovery: Zerto’s real-time encryption detection and journal-based recovery allows for quick restoration to a point in time before a ransomware attack, minimizing data loss and downtime.

Zerto enhances disaster recovery by providing continuous data protection, application consistency, automated failover and failback, non-disruptive testing, multi-cloud support, scalability, orchestration, comprehensive analytics, and robust compliance capabilities. This comprehensive approach ensures that organizations can effectively protect their data and applications, minimize downtime, and maintain business continuity in the face of disruptions.

Disaster recovery and cyber recovery are crucial to an organization's resilience strategy. Cyber recovery distinctly addresses issues related to cyber attacks which unlike other types of disasters include malicious behavior designed to prevent recovery. A solid business continuity recovery architecture requires understanding their differences and interactions.

• Similarities
  Both restore IT services and data for business continuity.
  They need frequent testing and upgrades to work.
  Both reduce disruption-related downtime and operational effect.
• How they work together
  Businesses should combine cyber and disaster recovery into a single business continuity plan to manage varied threats. It means:
  Coordination of cyber and non-cyber recovery plans.
  Installing cyber-resistant backup systems.
  Test response plans together to find gaps.
  Ensure IT security and business continuity teams collaborate.

Combining these methods helps firms protect operations, limit costs, and recover rapidly from disruptions like cyber attacks and natural disasters.