Evolution of Disaster Recovery Plan: From Traditional to Modern DRaaS Solutions

Why Does Your Business Require DRP?

Key Components of an Effective DRP: A Blueprint for Business Resilience

How Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Work

5 Types of Disaster Recovery Plan Offerings for Modern Businesses

How can Tx assist with Disaster Recovery Plan Testing?

Summary

Nowadays, businesses depend heavily on digital technologies for revenue growth and to improve customer support and service quality, as they want data and applications to be always available. Due to this, resilience has become a major aspect for organizations as they face various threats such as pandemics, natural disasters, and, last but not least, cyberattacks. According to a report, over 50% of businesses fail to reopen after experiencing a disaster, as they often strike without warning.   

That’s why it is important to prepare for quick recovery in case of any event that could interrupt business operations and result in data loss. In such cases, a disaster recovery plan is paramount to ensure business continuity in the digital environment. 

Evolution of Disaster Recovery Plan: From Traditional to Modern DRaaS Solutions

Disaster recovery, a subset of business continuity, is an enterprise’s capability to restore procedures and access to IT infrastructure after experiencing a disaster-type scenario (natural or man-made). It focuses on ensuring that the IT systems supporting critical business operations are fully functional promptly after a disaster event passes. 

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) consists of a documented strategy describing how a business can quickly become operational after an unplanned setback due to a disaster. It includes detailed instructions consisting of policies, procedures, and responsibilities on what to do during an unplanned event like a natural disaster, cyberattack, pandemic, power outage, etc. The plan helps minimize the after-effects of a disaster and ensures that the IT infrastructure can continue to operate its key operations. Even the slightest disruption can lead to revenue loss, customer dissatisfaction, and damage to brand image. On top of it, the longer the recovery time will be, the more severe the impact on business will be. That’s why organizations require a robust disaster recovery plan for a speedy recovery, no matter the disaster. 

Brief History of DRP 

Over the years, disaster recovery plana (DRP) have been significantly shaped by multiple factors, such as technical advancements, regulatory changes, and the rise of AI/ML and cloud computing. 

Why Does Your Business Require DRP? 

Disasters severely impact business operations and comprise a wide range of events such as natural phenomena like floods, earthquakes, etc., and man-made accidents like cyberattacks, fire, etc. Following are some of the disaster types for which organizations should be prepared for: 

No matter what type the disaster is, it can wreak havoc on businesses by causing data loss, IT infrastructure damage, and operations shut down. Having a disaster recovery plan will give you an outline to keep the damage to a minimum and speed up the recovery rate after the disaster is over. It will ensure business continuity by assisting you in restoring critical operations, data, systems, and applications. You can easily maintain and run crucial functionality during and after a disaster. 
 

A robust disaster recovery plan would also improve business resilience, allowing you to effectively adapt to unpredictable scenarios, remediate issues, and accelerate the recovery process. Also, according to the compliance requirements, it is necessary to implement a disaster recovery strategy in various industries. One must adhere to these regulations to ensure their commitment to operational reliability and better customer service. 

Key Components of an Effective DRP: A Blueprint for Business Resilience

Component Description Risk Assessment Identify potential disasters or threats (cyberattacks, hardware failures, natural disasters) that can affect business operations. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Evaluate the potential impact of disasters on critical business operations and processes to prioritize recovery efforts. Recovery Objectives Define Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to establish acceptable downtime and data loss limits. Data Backup Strategy Include detailed procedures for regularly backing up data, including frequency, location (on-site or cloud), and security measures. Communication Plan Outline communication protocols for internal teams and external stakeholders (customers, vendors, etc.) during a disaster. Roles and Responsibilities Assign specific recovery tasks to designated personnel, including a disaster recovery team with clear roles. IT Recovery Procedures List all steps for recovering IT systems, data, and networks, along with testing procedures for ensuring recovery readiness. Alternate Site Identify backup locations or alternative workspaces to maintain business continuity when primary facilities are unusable. Testing and Maintenance Establish a DRP testing schedule regularly to identify gaps and update the plan based on changes in the business or technology ecosystem. 

How Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Work?

Consider a scenario where a leading eCommerce company faced a severe disaster when its primary data center experienced a sudden power outage and hardware failure. The disruption halted its online operations, affecting customer orders, payment processing, and inventory management.  

If adequate measures are not taken, the company risks losing sales, damaging its reputation, and creating a bad customer experience.  
 
Now, how will DRP work in this situation? Let’s take a quick look: 

Step-1 Incident Detection and Response 

The company’s DRP was initiated as soon as the disruption was detected. The IT team quickly identified the problem and activated pre-defined response protocols. The affected systems were immediately isolated to ensure no further damage occurred and prevent corruption from spreading to backup servers. 

 
Step-2 Failover to Backup Systems 

The company’s DRP included cloud-based backups and a secondary data center, which allowed it to execute failover processes and redirect traffic and operations to the backup data center. This step ensured minimal disruption to online services, and the platform went live again quickly. 

 
Step-3 Switch to Manual Operations 

While the core systems were under-recovery, the company switched to manual inventory management and order fulfillment processes. Employees followed a paper-based approach for tracking incoming/outgoing orders and managing customer inquiries. This allowed them to ensure the continuity of critical business functions without automated systems. 

 
Step-4 Data Restoration and Verification 

After stabilizing operations via backup systems, the IT team initiated the restoration process using recent cloud backups. Once the primary data center was restored, all affected data was thoroughly checked for integrity and tested for potential issues before bringing it back online. 

 
Step-5 Post-disaster Review and Improvement 

After resuming normal operations, the company initiated a post-disaster review to assess its DRP performance. Based on the feedback, they identified areas for improvement, like frequent data backups and optimizing response times for switching to the backup data center. 

5 Types of Disaster Recovery Plan Offerings for Modern Businesses

Organizations can customize their DRPs according to their requirements or business environment. Let’s take a quick look at some of the types of disaster recovery plans that organizations should utilize: 

Disaster Recovery as a Service

DRaaS is a cloud-based DR service that enables enterprises to duplicate and host their physical and virtual servers on a third-party infrastructure. The responsibility of implementing and executing DRP falls on the service provider based on the service-level agreement (SLA). Its examples include data protection and backup platforms, data center providers, IaaS solutions, and colocation add-ons. 

Network Disaster Recovery

Good network connectivity is important for internal and external communication, data sharing, and service access in case of disaster. A network disaster recovery plan consists of detailed recovery procedures and information like network performance and networking team details. It helps in restoring network services and ensures access to secondary storage data units and backup data. 

Data Center Disaster Recovery

Companies using in-house data centers should implement a disaster recovery plan to address their IT infrastructure components and surrounding physical facilities. The primary focus of a data center disaster recovery plan is backup to failover sites located in colocation or secondary data centers. Businesses should document every component of these locations, such as cooling, storage capacity, power, heating, security protocols, and fire response. 

Virtual Disaster Recovery

Virtualization opens doors to more opportunities to efficiently and easily execute disaster recovery. Organizations can utilize a virtualized environment to spin up the new virtual machine runs within minutes and facilitate app recovery through high availability. It supports frequent replication and allows faster failover initiation.  

Cloud Disaster Recovery

As businesses are adopting or already implemented cloud services, they can directly host DRP in a cloud environment. Disaster recovery in the cloud can be space, cost, and time efficient, but it requires proper management. The IT teams should know the location of virtual and physical servers and must address security issues promptly through testing. 

How can Tx assist with Disaster Recovery Testing?

Disaster recovery testing involves examining every aspect of the disaster recovery plan and ensuring that you can continue operations, recover data, and restore critical applications after the service disruption. If you don’t invest in disaster recovery testing, there’s a high chance that your DRP will fail to execute as per your expectations when it’s important. We at Tx, will simulate disruptive scenarios and examine whether your IT infrastructure, systems, and workforce respond and recover from the disaster promptly, or not.  

Our security experts will thoroughly examine and provide detailed documentation and recommendations to help you improve disaster recovery procedures. We leverage best-in-the-industry tools to provide detailed analysis and reporting post-testing to identify any weaknesses in your DRP. Our experts can establish and validate RTO and RPO during testing to meet your business requirements.  

Summary

Every business, regardless of size, needs a robust Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) to ensure continuity during unforeseen disruptions. With companies relying heavily on digital technologies, threats like cyberattacks, power outages, and natural disasters can severely impact operations. A well-crafted DRP outlines strategies for quick recovery and minimizing data loss and downtime. This includes risk assessments, backup strategies, recovery objectives, and communication plans to handle any disaster scenario. Modern approaches like Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provide cost-effective, flexible solutions.  

At Tx, we offer comprehensive disaster recovery testing to assess vulnerabilities, ensuring businesses can quickly resume operations after any event. Our solutions focus on efficiency, using advanced tools like Tx-Secure to provide detailed analysis and help businesses meet Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO/RPO). To know how Tx can help, contact our experts now. 

The post Why Does Every Business Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?  first appeared on TestingXperts.

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