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Essential Steps for Crafting a Disaster Recovery Plan

Catastrophes in IT are inevitable; at some stage, they'll strike your systems. Be it fire, flood, hurricane, or corrupted data, these mishaps will occur eventually for any data center.

Essential Steps for Crafting a Disaster Recovery Plan
Essential Steps for Crafting a Disaster Recovery Plan

Essential Steps for Crafting a Disaster Recovery Plan

In today's digital age, businesses rely heavily on their IT systems to operate efficiently. However, the risk of disasters, such as data centre explosions, natural calamities, or corrupted data, can pose significant threats to these systems. To mitigate these risks, it's essential to adopt a structured, well-documented, and regularly tested approach to disaster recovery planning, particularly through automation.

The Imperatives for Disaster Recovery Planning

A comprehensive and systematic DR plan is necessary to maintain control, accountability, confidentiality, integrity, and availability during a disaster. Testing the DR plan is essential to prove its effectiveness and ensure it can be executed smoothly during a real disaster.

Best Practices for Automatic Disaster Recovery Planning

  1. Define Clear Recovery Objectives and Priorities
  2. Understand and document business-critical systems and data, distinguishing between urgent vs. less critical workloads. This guides recovery sequencing and resource allocation.
  3. Set Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) tailored for each system based on business impact.
  4. Implement Automated Backup and Replication Processes
  5. Use automated backup systems with a mix of daily incremental and weekly full backups. Schedule backups during low-traffic periods to minimize disruption.
  6. Leverage cloud storage and replication technologies for diverse environments, applying different strategies depending on system priority and cost constraints.
  7. Maintain Comprehensive and Accessible Documentation
  8. Develop detailed disaster recovery runbooks and procedures outlining step-by-step recovery actions tailored to various scenarios.
  9. Document system dependencies and prerequisites to ensure orderly recovery and verify system operability upon restoration.
  10. Establish Robust Visibility and Control Mechanisms
  11. Implement monitoring dashboards that provide real-time status on backup success, recovery drill outcomes, and system health accessible to all team members responsible for DR.
  12. Define clear authority on who can declare a disaster and activate recovery plans, including protocols for initial assessment and communication of incidents internally and externally.
  13. Regularly Test and Refine Disaster Recovery Procedures
  14. Perform monthly or quarterly recovery drills in isolated test environments using real backup data to measure actual recovery times against RTOs.
  15. Adjust and improve runbooks and processes based on test results, striving for a 100% backup success rate and recovery performance with buffer time to handle unexpected issues.
  16. Design for Heterogeneous Environments
  17. Use flexible recovery strategies that accommodate a mix of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments, tailoring recovery models such as pilot-light, warm standby, or full failover depending on the application architecture and criticality.
  18. Incorporate cross-site replication and cloud failover capabilities to handle infrastructure diversity and ensure continuity across platforms.
  19. Communication and Coordination
  20. Prepare communication plans that define contact details for internal teams and cloud or service vendors. Include backup communication channels for scenarios where primary systems are down.
  21. Keep stakeholders informed throughout the recovery process by assigning clear roles for notification, status updates, and customer communication.

These practices together build a resilient, automated disaster recovery system that provides clear visibility into backup and recovery status, strong control via well-defined roles and procedures, and the capability for rapid recovery even in complex IT environments spanning multiple technologies and locations.

Real-World Examples of Data Centre Disasters

  • A transformer exploded inside Shaw's data centre, causing service disruptions.
  • Vodafone's data centre in Istanbul experienced a flash flood.
  • Go Daddy had a six-hour outage due to bad data.

It's clear that a well-thought-out disaster recovery strategy is crucial for businesses to maintain their operations in the face of unexpected events. By automating disaster recovery planning, organisations can ensure visibility, control, and quick recovery, minimising downtime and potential data loss.

This article is sourced from Vladi Shlesman, Automic Software.

Technology plays a vital role in disaster recovery planning, as automation ensures visibility, control, and quick recovery of crucial data and systems. Adopting a structured approach, where recovery strategies are tailored to various scenarios, can help minimize downtime, reduce potential data loss, and maintain operations in the face of unexpected events.

In the realm of disaster recovery planning, it's essential to establish clear recovery objectives, prioritize business-critical systems, implement automated backup and replication processes, maintain comprehensive documentation, setup robust visibility and control mechanisms, perform regular tests and refinements, design for heterogeneous environments, and ensure effective communication and coordination amongst teams and partners.

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