Basics and Importance of Disaster Recovery (DR)

DR is an aspect of an organization’s security planning, which should be developed in conjunction with its business continuity planning. This planning involves creating policies and procedures that will protect a company from the impact of an unforeseen event, such as a hardware or software failure, cyberattack, or manmade or natural disaster.

The measures for disaster recovery typically fall under three categories:

Preventive: Objective is preventing any occurrence of an event.

Corrective: Are pre-positioned to correct a system should an event occur

Detective: Objective is discovering or detecting an event.

Importance of Disaster Recovery

DR lets a company swiftly restore mission-critical functions after a disaster occurs, preserving business continuity. Nowadays, organizations are increasingly dependent on and accustomed to maintaining high data availability because their tolerance to downtime has lessened tremendously.

A disaster can devastate a company in terms of lost reputation and revenue in very competitive industries. As there is a high probability a business will fail after suffering significant data loss, DR is now perceived to be an essential aspect of operations.

Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) are two gauges utilized to evaluate disaster recovery performance.

RPO – This is the length of time that can pass during a disruption before the amount of data lost during this period exceeds the business continuity plan’s maximum allowable tolerance. For example, a business with an RPO of five hours must perform a data backup every five hours or less.

RTO – This is the maximum amount of time after a disaster that a busines can tolerate for recovering mission-critical files from backup and restoring normal operations. To put simply, a company with an RTO of two hours cannot tolerate having a downtime for longer than 2 hours.

An effective way for restoring data swiftly, recovery-in-place involves utilizing technology that allows moving backup files into a live state on a backup appliance, eliminating having to transmit data across a network. This method provides protection from the failure of a storage and server system.

Alpha Engineering Business Support

Choosing an expert computer technology-support provider is an important decision for your business. Alpha has been a trusted partner of many companies in the Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Annapolis areas since 1990. For affordable client-focused network consulting services and solutions, please call Alpha Engineering Associates today at (410) 295-9500.