Disaster Recovery (DR)

Discover the significance of Disaster Recovery (DR), a critical strategy that ensures business continuity in the face of unexpected events.

Definition

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the process and set of strategies and procedures an organization follows to recover and restore critical IT infrastructure and data following a disruptive event. It aims to minimize downtime, restore normal operations, and mitigate the impact of a disaster on business continuity.

Explanation

Disasters can take various forms, including natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes), technological failures (e.g., hardware malfunctions, software errors), human errors (e.g., accidental data deletion), or cyber attacks (e.g., ransomware). A well-designed disaster recovery plan enables organizations to respond effectively to these events, ensuring the continuity of their operations and minimizing data loss.

A typical disaster recovery process involves several key steps, including assessing risks, defining recovery objectives, implementing backup and recovery solutions, establishing recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), and regularly testing the recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness.

DR solutions may involve various components, such as offsite data backups, redundant systems, failover mechanisms, backup power supplies, and geographically dispersed data centers. These measures aim to create a resilient infrastructure that can be quickly restored to a functional state following a disaster.

Related terms

• Business Continuity Planning (BCP): The process of developing strategies and procedures to ensure the continuous operation of critical business functions during and after a disaster.

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable downtime or duration within which systems and operations must be restored after a disaster.

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, indicating the point to which data must be recovered to resume operations.

• High Availability (HA): The capability of a system to remain operational and accessible during planned or unplanned downtime.

• Failover: The process of transferring operations from a primary system to a secondary system in the event of a failure or disaster.

• Data Replication: The process of copying data to a secondary location in real-time or near real-time to ensure its availability and integrity in the event of a disaster.