Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are measures designed to protect businesses in the event of unexpected catastrophe, including cyberattacks, tech and equipment failures, natural disasters or power outages.
Data backup is one of the simplest forms of disaster recovery, yet even this provides only limited protection due to ransomware hiding within backup sets.
An Canadian IT company can help you develop and implement a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that will protect your business from a variety of threats.
1. Cold Site
Unplanned outages can have devastating repercussions for any company, leading to lost revenue and being unable to service clients. Therefore, businesses should include disaster recovery sites in their plans as a precautionary measure in case an unanticipated incident arises that requires urgent response and recovery efforts.
Cold site disaster recovery plans offer the simplest option for disaster recovery, requiring only basic infrastructure such as power and networking capabilities. Unfortunately, however, hardware equipment must also be shipped and installed which disrupts workflow – though more cost-effective in comparison with more comprehensive uptime requirements.
Hot site disaster recovery plans involve setting up a separate computer centre in a remote location which replicates data constantly and actively backs it up, as well as including desks and phones at a higher price point. Deciding the appropriate DR site depends upon assessing its business impact as well as understanding your RTOs/RPOs.
2. Warm Site
Unplanned outages can cripple a business’s ability to generate revenue and serve clients. But with an effective disaster recovery site in place, it may be possible to mitigate damage and prevent costly downtime.
Warm sites provide office space and the technology infrastructure used when primary data centers go offline, such as backup systems and redundant hardware/software. Warm sites are ideal for businesses that can endure up to several days of downtime while simultaneously cutting costs; they don’t require as much monitoring/management, yet still share comparable setup/equipment costs with hot sites.
An organization’s choice of disaster recovery plan depends on how much downtime they can tolerate and their required recovery speed. Hot site recovery offers the fastest option; subsequent recovery options are warm site, warm site and cold site – each has their own set of advantages and disadvantages; for a comprehensive business continuity strategy it is wise to explore all three approaches as possible to meet company’s requirements.
3. Cloud
Cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) alleviates the hassle and cost of maintaining an extra physical data center while helping minimize data loss in case of disaster by backing up and replicating systems and applications to a secure virtual environment.
Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions enable organizations to rapidly restore operating systems and software applications with faster recovery times than using physical servers to install and configure hardware manually. This makes backup easier while eliminating manual installations or configuration of hardware for faster recoveries.
Cloud-based DR solutions can be an invaluable asset in helping reduce the amount of downtime resulting from disaster, especially for businesses such as banks, brokerages and healthcare organizations. It’s also essential to establish your RPO (recovery point objective), so you know exactly how much data can be lost without seriously disrupting business continuity.
4. Hot Site
Hot sites provide continuous backups that enable immediate recovery, with high levels of data synchronization supporting minimal rollbacks. Unfortunately, they’re very costly to run, requiring far enough distance from your primary site so a disaster at your main location doesn’t impact DR locations as well.
At its core, choosing whether to utilize a warm, cold or neutral site depends upon how much downtime your company can tolerate. To determine the optimal choice for you, conduct a risk analysis to establish RTO/RPO targets; this will inform the type of disaster recovery plan needed.
All types of disaster recovery plans should be tailored to your organization’s specific needs and RTO/RPO targets.
