The anatomy and importance of disaster recovery planning

Understanding disaster recovery

What will you do if a hurricane hits your area, knocking down phone lines and flooding your server room? Who is in charge of mitigating damage? What steps will you take to respond? Or, same questions, different events:

• Earthquakes
• Pandemics
• Cyberattacks
• Building fires

Good disaster recovery planning prevents data loss, service interruption, and ensures operational integrity following a disaster. Plans might address what to do in the aftermath of events that affect business personnel, buildings, or regions. It’s impossible to perfectly prepare for any unforeseeable event. Nevertheless, disaster recovery planning provides reliable frameworks for quickly restoring normal business functions.

The anatomy of a disaster recovery plan

Disaster recovery is a critical component of the business continuity planning ecosystem. Each component serves a vital role in safeguarding your data, infrastructure, premises, and the people who rely on them.

For disambiguation, business continuity plans are proactive measures to ensure continuation of service during an event. They detail who to contact during emergencies, how to operate in offline mode, and what steps to take to figuratively and literally keep the doors open.

On the other hand, disaster recovery is a set of reactive measures to minimize the fallout from a disaster. Disaster recovery plans outline how to keep systems operational when an event impacts or destroys data, infrastructure, or premises.

Disaster recovery efforts don’t start with an emergency event—they start with planning. There are three foundational components of any disaster recovery plan.

1. Your business impact analysis (BIA) assesses the possibility and consequences of a negative event. It determines the impact of various specific threats, such as a damaged server, loss of communications or connectivity, or a compromised workspace.
2. Your recovery time objective (RTO) is a target time in which business processes should be restored. Failing to meet the target time could have significant operational consequences.
3. Your recovery point objective (RPO) is the target for the maximum acceptable amount of data loss after a system or network failure. This data loss is measured in time via the age of files or data needed to resume operations without issue.

A disaster recovery plan uses the business impact analysis as a starting point. The recovery time and recovery point objectives are its end goals. In the middle are step-by-step procedures that lead from impacted business processes to recovery.

How automation aids disaster recovery efforts

The procedures that lead from BIA to RPOs and RTOs constitute a disaster recovery plan. Some companies might have a couple dozen disaster recovery steps. Others have thousands. Often, each of those steps is tedious but mission critical. As such, they require proper training and manual operation (that may be on-premise). It also introduces inefficiency and the risk of human error.

Inefficiency and human error are a large part of why disaster recovery often takes so long—and why recovery time objectives are hard to meet. Removing them from the equation virtually eliminates those risks.

OpCon, the workload automation platform powered by SMA Technologies, automates the bulk of disaster recovery processes. OpCon eliminates reliance on key personnel to oversee and perform recovery tasks. It handles the complex, interconnected recovery processes, automatically or with the click of a button, allowing people to pursue other recovery tasks.

A proven track record

Enterprise Services New Zealand’s data centers serve thousands of clients in more than 60 countries. Their clients expect a high level of uptime to meet SLAs and deliver services. Consequently, the reliability of their servers is critical.

However, Enterprise Services New Zealand had two things working against them. First, they’re based in a highly geologically active area, making it prone to earthquakes. Second, they house and support a wide range of operating systems, software, and infrastructure. Consequently, not only was geological disaster rather likely—it was exceedingly complicated to recover from.

Enterprise Services New Zealand previously needed three days and a team of people to replicate tens of thousands of processes and dependencies at their failover site. Using the OpCon automation platform, they were able to speed up and simplify their disaster recovery process so that a single person could meet improved RTOs and RPOs in less than thirty minutes.

Request a demo to see how OpCon can ensure consistent uptime and service for your organization.