Disaster Recovery

What Is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a companies method of regaining access and functionality to its IT infrastructure after events like a natural disaster, cyber attack, or even business disruptions like COVID-19.

Disaster Recovery involves a tools, policies, and procedures to enable recovery or continuation of important information technology (IT) infrastructure and systems following a system take down.

• Complete computer room environments
• Critical IT hardware including network infrastructure, servers, desktop or laptop computers, wireless devices, and peripherals
• Service provider connectivity
• Enterprise software applications
• Data storage devices or applications

Why is a DR plan important?

Key reasons why a business would want a detailed and tested disaster recovery plan include:

• Minimal interruptions to normal operations.
• Limit the extent of disruption and damage.
• Reduce the economic impact of the interruption.
• Set alternative means of operation in advance.
• Train personnel with emergency procedures.
• Provide for smooth and rapid restoration of service.

The need to drive superior customer experience and business outcome is fueling the growing trend of hybrid multicloud adoption by companies of all sizes. However, Hybrid multicloud, creates infrastructure complexity and potential risks that require a specialist with the right tools and experience to manage.

Due to the complexity, organizations are suffering frequent outages and system breakdowns, along with cyber-attacks, and supplier failure. The impact of outages or unplanned downtime to a business can be extremely high, especially in a hybrid multicloud environment. Having resiliency in a hybrid multicloud requires a disaster recovery plan which includes an integrated strategy and advanced technologies, including data protection and recovery safety measures.

Most enterprise level organizations have comprehensive enterprise resiliency with orchestration technology to help minimize business continuity risks in hybrid multicloud. This enables these businesses to achieve their digital transformation goals and keeps them and their customers safe from disasters.

Data center disaster recovery

First we define the frequency with which the receiving system (the backup environment) acknowledges the receipt of data from the sending system (the production environment). The 3 most common replication methods are:

Semi-Synchronous Replication

The receiving system saves after a series of changes have been received. This method of synchronization offers reliability in the event of a disaster – can allow for some loss of data and a reasonable amount of downtime.

Asynchronous Replication 

This method is the fastest, cheapest and least secure method of system replication. The sending system basically continues to send data, without receiving any response meaning if your receiving system is down you're going to lose data.