What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is the implementation of a plan of action by an organization to regain access and functionality of its resources and tech infrastructure in emergencies or types of disasters such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, or, as seen recently, due to business disruptions due to the global pandemic.
Disaster Recovery is an integral part of an organization’s business continuity plan. Disaster recovery strategy designs depend on key business continuity factors such as recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) or recovery as a service (RaaS) is a cloud-based computing service that protects an organization's data from hacking, service disruptions, and other mission-critical disasters that could result in data loss for the organization.
Since the disaster plan depends mainly on the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), it’s imperative for organizations to determine their RPO and RTO.
Recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data a company can afford to lose in times of disasters that hamper production. RPO determines how frequently a company backs up its data to resume operations at the earliest.
The amount of time a business needs to get restored to prevent a potentially unsalvageable amount of impact is the recovery time objective (RTO).
A disaster recovery strategy is crucial for any business- big or small. A comprehensive backup ensures that an organization is equipped to meet time-bound commitments in times of disasters. Additionally, with a disaster recovery plan, organizations are prepared in advance to preserve and retain mission-critical operations with strict adherence to deadlines. With point-in-time recovery, organizations commonly assign administrators who restore and recover data from the past.
A sturdy disaster recovery plan is highly beneficial for business continuity and customer retention. Some other benefits of disaster recovery include:
- Limits the loss of revenue: disaster recovery plans limit the financial losses of an organization occurring due to data migration or recovery. Though there is an investment cost attached with DRaaS, your business reduces costs in the long term by reducing the cost of restoring data, lowering the downtime costs, and technical expenditure.
- Safeguard business operations: By protecting critical processes vital for business continuity, disaster recovery solutions minimize the interruptions in those processes and allow minimum delays in resuming business functions.
- Protects business reputation: By securing and protecting the customers' data, service DRaaS help safeguard an organization's reputation. With a short downtime period for data recovery, recovery services minimize interruptions for seamless business continuity.
- Additional protection: Businesses can protect sensitive information from getting lost with an extra layer of recovery protection apart from anti-virus software.
- Prevention of data loss: With the help of risk analysis in predicting any upcoming disaster, businesses can backup, manage, and store data without losing control of their functions