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Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery planning is a process that includes performing risk assessment, establishing priorities, developing recovery strategies in case of a disaster. Any business should have a concrete plan for disaster recovery to resume normal business operations as quickly as possible after a disaster.

IT disaster recovery control measures can be classified into the following three types:

Preventive measures – Controls aimed at preventing an event from occurring.

Detective measures – Controls aimed at detecting or discovering unwanted events.

Corrective measures – Controls aimed at correcting or restoring the system after a disaster or an event.

Good disaster recovery plan measures dictate that these three types of controls be documented and exercised regularly using so-called "DR tests".

Helpful Terms

(RTO) recovery time objective - the maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network, or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.

(RPO) Recovery Point Objective - indicates the maximum ‘age’ of files that an organization must recover from backup storage for normal operations to resume after a disaster.

A Disater Recovery Plan can include:

Diagram of the entire IT network and the recovery site.

Identifying the most critical IT assets and determining the maximum outage time. Get to know the terms Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RPO indicates the maximum ‘age’ of files that an organization must recover from backup storage for normal operations to resume after a disaster.

List of software, license keys and systems that will be used in the recovery effort.

Technical documentation from vendors on recovery technology system software.

Summary of insurance coverage.

Proposals for dealing with financial and legal issues, as well as media outreach.

Typically, IT disaster recovery plans take into consideration factors including data integrity and availability, network connectivity, voice and email communications channels, IT servers and services, backup power sources, and more.

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