Disaster recovery (DR) ensures business continuity by restoring technology systems after catastrophic events like cyberattacks, natural disasters, or infrastructure failures.
Why it matters
- Extended downtime can cost businesses $5,600+ per minute on average.
- Ransomware attacks make DR planning essential for every organization.
- Compliance frameworks require documented DR procedures.
- Customer expectations demand minimal service disruption.
Key metrics
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Maximum acceptable downtime—how fast must you recover?
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Maximum acceptable data loss—how recent must your backup be?
- MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery): Average actual recovery time.
- MTPD (Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption): Point where business impact becomes unacceptable.
DR strategies (by RTO)
- Backup and restore (hours/days): Restore from backups to new infrastructure.
- Pilot light (minutes/hours): Core systems running in standby, scale up when needed.
- Warm standby (minutes): Scaled-down copy of production ready to scale up.
- Multi-site active/active (seconds): Traffic served from multiple locations simultaneously.
Essential components
- Data backup: Regular, tested backups with offsite/cloud copies.
- Documentation: Runbooks, contact lists, vendor information.
- Communication plan: How to notify stakeholders during outages.
- Alternative sites: Hot/warm/cold sites for operations.
- Testing: Regular DR drills to validate procedures.
Cloud DR considerations
- Multi-region deployments for resilience.
- Infrastructure as Code for rapid reconstruction.
- Database replication across availability zones.
- Automated failover mechanisms.
- Cost-benefit analysis of always-on standby vs. on-demand recovery.
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