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Disaster recovery What is disaster recovery?
In IT, disaster recovery (DR) refers to the strategies, processes, products, and solutions you put in place to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. This includes natural disasters, cyber-attacks, hardware failures, and other catastrophic events.
Disaster recovery is critical because it minimizes downtime in the case of disaster and protects data integrity. It helps businesses quickly resume operations and reduce the impact of disruptions. All businesses should have a disaster recovery plan and a cyber recovery plan as part of their business continuity and business resilience strategy.
- Disaster recovery plan (DRP)
- RTO and RPO
- Disaster recovery testing
- HPE and disaster recovery
- What is the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery?
What is a disaster recovery plan (DRP) and why is it so important?
A disaster recovery plan is a documented, structured approach with instructions for responding to unplanned business interruptions. It includes a detailed plan for recovering IT infrastructure, applications, and data.
A DRP 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 DRP 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.
What are RTO and RPO?
The two most important factors in disaster recovery are getting operations back online as quickly as possible (RTO) and preventing data loss (RPO).
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the targeted duration of time within which a business process must be restored after a disaster to avoid unacceptable consequences. RTO is factored based on both a determination of maximum tolerable downtime and the capability of the disaster recovery solution and plan to execute the recovery.
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. RPO is factored by a combination of how much data loss is tolerable and how much data loss can technically be prevented by the data protection and disaster recovery plan and solution.
RTOs and RPOs can vary between applications and data sets based on business impact analysis or risk assessment. Critical systems may have RTOs and RPOs measured in minutes or seconds while non-critical systems may have RTOs and RPOs measured in hours, days, or even weeks. Both downtime and data loss, which RTO and RPO are meant to prevent, can have serious financial and reputational impacts on businesses, which is why RTO and RPO are so important in disaster-recovery planning.
Aggressive RTOs measured in minutes are typically achieved with failover and failback. Failover is typically an automated process initiated manually when a disruption occurs that quickly brings a replica workload online taking the place of the disrupted application or data workload.
During failover, from a user perspective, the application and data come back online in a matter of minutes as if the primary workload is back online. On the back end, the workloads are now running from the replica which may be located at a remote disaster recovery site. Failback is the process of shifting users back to the primary workload once it has been fully restored from the disruption.
Failover and failback typically reduce downtime and RTO from hours or days to minutes compared to recovering workloads from backups. Similarly, RPO can be reduced to seconds rather than hours or days by using real-time replication solutions vs. periodic backup technologies.
What is disaster recovery testing?
Disaster recovery testing is a set of exercises and validations to confirm that disaster recovery plans and solutions work as intended. Disaster recovery testing is often a requirement for compliance with data protection regulations and maintaining industry standards. It is a valuable exercise to train staff on disaster recovery plans and to update disaster recovery plans based on test outcomes.
Benefits of disaster recovery testing:
- Compliance with data protection regulations and standards
- Validating and updating disaster recovery plans
- Keeping staff trained on disaster recovery plans and procedures
- Validating RTOs, RPOs, and service level agreements (SLAs)
Disaster recovery testing can range in scope from recovering a single application or data set to a full site-level or multi-site disaster recovery that simulates a specific disruption like a natural disaster. Larger scale tests can cause larger disruptions and require more resources, so they are often performed less frequently than smaller scale tests.
How often testing is performed typically depends on how time consuming and disruptive it is to operations. Depending on the capabilities of the disaster recovery tools, even testing a single application can disrupt productivity. Ideally, the disaster recovery tools have built-in testing capabilities that allow testing without disrupting production. With these tools in place, testing can be performed frequently.
Disaster recovery testing best practices:
- Test frequently – ideally quarterly or twice a year
- Prioritize testing of the most critical workloads with the most aggressive RTOs and RPOs
- Test all workloads against their RTOs, RPOs, and SLAs
- Validate testing in association with application and network administrators
- Document test results and update disaster recovery plans as necessary
What does HPE offer for disaster recovery?
HPE Zerto Software helps organizations with disaster recovery capabilities to protect their data and applications from disruptions:
Continuous Data Protection (CDP): HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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: HPE Zerto Software 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 Resilience: HPE Zerto Software real-time encryption detection, immutable data copies, and journal-based recovery allows for early threat detection, protection of recovery data, and quick restoration to a point in time before a ransomware attack, minimizing data loss and downtime.
HPE Zerto Software 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.
What is the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery?
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. This means:
- Coordinating cyber and non-cyber recovery plans.
- Installing cyber-resistant backup systems.
- Testing response plans together to find gaps.
- Ensuring 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.
Key differences between disaster recovery and cyber recovery
Aspect | Disaster recovery | Cyber recovery
|
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Recovery from a broad range of disruptions, including natural disasters, hardware failures, and human errors | Recovery from cyber threats like ransomware that cause downtime and data loss |
| Threats addressed | Natural and man-made disruptions that impact IT infrastructure and business operations | Malicious cyber activities intended to compromise data and prevent recovery
|
| Scope | Restoring IT infrastructure, applications, and data, sometimes requiring relocation of operations
| Restoring data integrity, securing compromised systems, and eliminating cyber threats |
| Components | Data backup, system failover, alternate site arrangements, business continuity planning, and infrastructure restoration
| Incident response, forensic analysis, malware eradication, cybersecurity measures, and secure data backups
|
| Objective | Minimize downtime and financial losses by restoring IT systems and business operations
| Contain, eliminate, and recover from cyber threats while ensuring data security
|