Disaster recovery guide for IT infrastructures
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Modern organizations need complex IT infrastructures functioning properly to provide goods and services at the expected level of performance. Therefore, losing critical parts or the whole infrastructure can put the organization on the edge of disappearance. Disasters remain a threat to production processes.
Why is Recovery Important in IT Industry? A sound recovery plan is important for any business, but it's especially critical for businesses that rely heavily on IT infrastructure. This is because a major disruption to your IT infrastructure can have a ripple effect throughout your entire organization, affecting everything from operations to customer service. Recovery planning helps ensure that your business can keep running even if your IT infrastructure is hit by a disaster.
What is a disaster? A disaster is challenging trouble that instantly overwhelms the capacity of available human, IT, financial and other resources and results in significant losses of valuable assets (for example, documents, intellectual property objects, data or hardware).
There are three main types of disasters:
A natural disaster is the first thing that probably comes to your mind when you hear the word “disaster”. Different types of natural disasters include: floods, earthquakes, forest fires, abnormal heat, intense snowfalls, heavy rains, hurricanes and tornadoes, sea and ocean storms.
Technological disaster is the consequence of anything connected with the malfunctions of tech infrastructure, human error or evil will. The list can include any issue from a software disruption in an organization to a power plant problem causing difficulties in the whole city, region or even country.
Hybrid disasters describes mixed disasters that unite the features of natural and technological factors. For example, a dam failure can cause a flood resulting in a power outage and communication issues across the entire region or country.
What is disaster recovery? Disaster recovery (DR) is a set of actions (methodology) that an organization should take to recover and restore operations after a global disruptive event. Major disaster recovery activities focus on regaining access to data, hardware, software, network devices, connectivity and power supply. DR actions can also cover rebuilding logistics, relocating staff members and office equipment, in case of damaged or destroyed assets.
The key elements of a DR plan are: Risk assessment and impact analysis Defined RPO and RTO DR team responsibilities distributed DR site creation Preparations for failback Remote storage Equipment list Established communication channels Immediate response sequences Incident reporting instructions Disaster recovery testing and adjustment Optimal DR strategy choice