In business terms, a disaster is any event that destroys or seriously disrupts a company’s resources such as its IT equipment, its data or its physical environment. The disaster may be due to theft, a natural event, human error or a cyber attack. Disaster recovery (DR) is a reactive plan of action to minimise the effects of the disaster and keeps the business running while it’s being sorted out.
For a more detailed description look at this article :Â WHAT IS DISASTER RECOVERY, RPO AND RTO?
Find out why disaster recovery is so important.
A good DR plan contains a strategy for how to continue from every type of disaster. It will include a complete plan of action so that employees know their roles before chaos hits, systems can slot into place to safeguard your business operations, and your data is already backed up.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a DR outsourcing model where an organisation’s servers are replicated and hosted in the cloud by a third party. The advantage of DRaaS is that when disaster strikes a team of professionals will handle your account and your recovery time will be quicker.
IT risk is any threat to your business data, systems and processes. A threat usually falls into one of four categories: security, availability, performance and compliance.
Business critical functions are the apps and activities that are vital to the functioning of your business and therefore its survival. These will vary between businesses, but for most they’re the functions that
It’s a system to predict the consequences that a disruption to business operations would cause. Evaluating the impact of disasters, accidents and emergencies is an important basis for investment in disaster recovery.
RTO stands for recovery time objective and refers to the optimal time-frame necessary for restoring a business from a disruption or disaster in order to maintain business continuity (i.e. keep your business going).
RPO stands for recovery point objective and refers to the amount of data loss your business can tolerate following a disaster. It examines the time between data backups and the amount of data that could be lost.
Keep this handy formula in mind when calculating your risk:
Total cost of downtime = loss of productivity + loss of revenue + cost to restore operations + cost of reputational damage
For more information check out our blog:Â What should your business’s recovery target be?
The image below outlines what these terms actually mean.
Business continuity is a proactive plan to maintain the functionality of a business as a whole. It has a wider scope than disaster recovery and includes policies, tools and procedures to manage staff and customers and prevent disruptions and disasters. In other words, business continuity is the plan that’ll keep a business going over time. Disaster recovery is one aspect of business continuity planning.
The template for a business continuity plan will include the steps to take for all kinds of disruptions, whether they’re large like a cyber attack, fire or a terrorist attack or whether they’re small like a power outage or network failure.
Your business continuity strategy will involve all aspects of your business, from its systems and assets to human resources and IT. It will consider the risks to each of these elements and set out the necessary steps to enable them to function normally when a disruption has taken place.
IT service continuity is a part of business continuity planning that involves IT disaster recovery and overall IT resilience. It extends to the communication systems of a business and the discipline of keeping up with evolving technology.
Disaster recovery planning is a vital part of business continuity because it prepares a business for the quickest possible recovery from a disruptive or disastrous event. As cyber threats increase and a business’s tolerance for downtime decreases, it becomes more and more important to have a good DR plan in place and a clear route to keeping your business going.
These days we’re creating and consuming data faster than ever before. Businesses use data directly to run their businesses and indirectly to learn about trends and opportunities so they can make good business decisions.
Data management refers to the processes and policies a business uses to control its data in terms of location of data, quality, security and recoverability. It’s rooted in the fact that you need to know your data BEFORE you can manage it.
Good data management enables businesses to collect, store, process, share, validate and protect data, especially personal data, in a safe, compliant and justified way.
Regular data backups are vital to ensure recoverability from a minor or major disruption but they don’t serve to prevent a disruption of any kind. Ideally a business will have a data backup plan in conjunction with a disaster recovery plan so that it can, in the first instance, avoid a disruption and in the second, recover from one quickly if a disruption was unavoidable.
Data archiving is the process of moving data that a business no longer uses to a safe storage for possible future reference or to comply with data regulations while data backup is the process of duplicating vital business documents on a regular basis so that they’re retrievable in the event of a minor or major disruption.
The EU’s Generation Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) sets out six data management principles for businesses to abide by:
If you follow the GDPR’s data management principles you’ll be handling your data not only with integrity and accountability, but lawfully too.
A third party data management service can provide you with ‘software as a service’ that takes care of your backup, disaster recovery, detection and archiving needs, in a single comprehensive solution
Find out why disaster recovery is important for your business and read six dreaded things it will protect you from.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a DR outsourcing model where an organisation’s servers are replicated and hosted in the cloud by a third party. The advantage of DRaaS is that when disaster strikes a team of professionals will handle your account and your recovery time will be quicker.
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