Disaster recovery is the ability to restore access and functionality to an organization's IT infrastructure after a catastrophic event, whether caused by natural or human action (or error). Disaster recovery is considered a subset of business continuity and focuses on ensuring IT systems that support critical business processes are up and running as soon as possible after a disruptive event occurs.

Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial, especially for all businesses operating partially or fully in the cloud. Disasters that interrupt service and cause data loss can occur at any time without warning; there may be an outage on your network, a critical error may be posted, or your business may have to weather a natural disaster. Organizations with robust and well-tested disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and quickly resume essential operations when things go wrong.

Learn more about Google Cloud backup and disaster recovery features and products.

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What is IT disaster recovery?

IT disaster recovery is a portfolio of policies, tools, and processes that are used to recover critical IT infrastructure, software and systems after a natural or human-caused disaster or to continue their operations.

The first and most important element of a disaster recovery plan is the cloud. The cloud is considered the best solution for both business continuity and disaster recovery. The cloud eliminates the need to run a separate disaster recovery data center (or recovery site).

What is a disaster recovery site?

It is a second physical data center that is costly to build and maintain and has become redundant thanks to the cloud.

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What is considered a disaster?

Disaster recovery planning and strategies focus on responding to and recovering from disasters, events that interrupt or completely stop a business.

These events can be natural disasters such as hurricanes, as well as a serious system failure, a deliberate attack, or even human error.

Types of catastrophes can include:

• Pandemics and epidemics
• Cyber attacks (e.g. malware, DDoS and ransomware attacks)
• Other deliberate, human-caused threats, such as terrorist or biochemical attacks
• Technological hazards (e.g. power outages, pipeline explosions and transport accidents)
• Machine and hardware failure

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The importance of disaster recovery

Technology is playing an increasingly important role in all areas of the business world, with applications and services that enable companies to be more agile, accessible and in touch. This trend has contributed to the widespread adoption of cloud computing by organizations to support growth, innovation, and exceptional customer experience.

However, the shift to cloud environments (public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud) and the growth of the remote workforce brings greater infrastructure complexity and potential risks. Disaster recovery for cloud-based systems is critical to an overall business continuity strategy. A system failure or an unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for organizations that rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep things running smoothly.

In addition, data privacy laws and standards require most organizations to now have a disaster recovery strategy. Failure to comply with disaster recovery plans can result in compliance violations and high legal fines.

No matter what industry or size, every business needs to be able to quickly recover from any event that stops its daily operations. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer reputational damage that can lead to data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget spending, and loss of customers and revenue.

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How does disaster recovery work?

Disaster recovery should have a solid plan to get critical applications and infrastructure up and running after an outage, ideally in minutes.

An effective Disaster Recovery plan addresses three distinct elements:

- Preventive: To ensure that your systems are as safe as possible, using tools and techniques to prevent a disaster from occurring in the first place. This may include backing up critical data or continuously monitoring environments for configuration errors and compatibility violations.

- Fixing: You need to know when an intervention is necessary for quick recovery. These measures focus on detecting or discovering unwanted events in real time.

- Correction: These measures aim to plan for possible disaster recovery scenarios, provide backup operations to mitigate the impact, and implement recovery procedures to quickly restore data and systems when the time comes.

Typically, disaster recovery involves safely replicating and backing up critical data and workloads to a secondary location or multiple locations (disaster recovery sites). A disaster recovery site can be used to recover data from the most recent backup or from a previous point in time. Organizations can also switch to using a DR site until the primary location is restored if their primary location and systems fail due to an unforeseen event.

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Types of disaster recovery

The types of disaster recovery you will need will depend on your IT infrastructure, the type of backup and recovery you use, and the assets you need to protect.

Here are some of the most common technologies and techniques used in disaster recovery:

• Backups: With backups, you back up data to an off-site system or send an external drive to an off-site location. However, backups do not include any IT infrastructure, so they are not considered a complete disaster recovery solution.
• Backup as a Service (BaaS): Similar to remote data backup, BaaS solutions provide regular data backups offered by a third-party provider.
• Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): Many cloud providers offer DRaaS along with cloud service models such as IaaS and PaaS. The DRaaS service model allows you to back up your data and IT infrastructure and host it in the cloud infrastructure of a third-party provider. During a crisis, the provider will implement and organize your disaster recovery plan to help recover access and functionality with minimal disruption to operations.
• Virtual Disaster Recovery: This solution allows you to back up operations and data, or even create an exact copy of your IT infrastructure and run it on off-premises virtual machines (VMs). In the event of a disaster, you can reinstall your backup and resume work quickly. Frequent data and workload transfer is required for this solution to be effective.
• Disaster recovery sites: These are locations that organizations can use temporarily after a disaster event, containing backups of data, systems, and other technology infrastructure.

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Benefits of disaster recovery

Stronger business continuity

Every second counts when your business is offline, which affects productivity, customer experience, and your company's reputation. Disaster recovery helps protect critical business operations by ensuring that critical business operations can be recovered with little or no disruption.

Enhanced security

FK plans use data backup and other procedures that strengthen your security structure and limit the impact of attacks and other security risks. For example, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer built-in security features such as advanced encryption, identity and access management, and enterprise policy.

Faster restore

Disaster recovery solutions make it easy to restore your data and workloads, so you can quickly bring business operations back online after a catastrophic event. Disaster recovery plans take advantage of data replication and often rely on automated recovery to minimize downtime and data loss.

Reduced recovery costs

The monetary effects of a catastrophic event can range from loss of work and productivity to data privacy penalties. With disaster recovery, you can avoid or at least minimize some of these costs. Cloud disaster recovery processes can also reduce the operating costs associated with operating and maintaining a secondary location.

High availability

Many cloud-based services come with high availability features that can support your disaster recovery strategy. These features help ensure an agreed level of performance and offer internal backup and automatic failover, protecting data against equipment failure and other small-scale events that could affect data availability.

Better compatibility

Disaster recovery planning supports compliance requirements by considering potential risks and defining a set of specific procedures and protections for your data and workloads in the event of a disaster. This usually includes strong data backup applications, FK sites, and regularly testing your FK plan to make sure your organization is ready.

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Disaster recovery strategy planning

A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy should include detailed emergency response requirements, backup operations, and recovery procedures. Disaster recovery strategies and plans often help build a broader business continuity strategy that includes contingency plans to mitigate impacts beyond the IT infrastructure and systems, ensuring that all business areas resume normal operations as soon as possible.

When creating disaster recovery strategies, you should carefully consider the following key criteria:

• Recovery time target (RTO):

The maximum acceptable period during which systems and applications can remain shut down without significant damage to the business. For example, some applications may remain offline for an hour, while others may need to be recovered in minutes.

• Recovery point target (RPO): Maximum life of the data you need to recover to resume operations after a major event. RPO helps define the frequency of backups.

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When creating your recovery strategy, it is useful to consider your RTO and RPO values and choose a disaster recovery model that will allow you to achieve these values and your overall goals. Typically, the smaller your values (or the faster your applications need to be recovered after an outage), the higher the cost of running your application.

Cloud disaster recovery can greatly reduce RTO and RPO costs when it comes to meeting on-premises requirements for capacity, security, network infrastructure, bandwidth, support, and facilities. A highly managed service in Google Cloud can help you avoid most, if not all, of the complex factors and allow you to significantly reduce many business costs.

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What is disaster recovery used for?

Disaster recovery strategies help protect business operations in a number of important ways. Here are some common use cases.

Ensuring business flexibility

Regardless, a good FK plan can ensure that the business can quickly return to full operation without data or transaction loss.

Maintain competitiveness

When a business goes offline, the loyalty of customers also decreases. They turn to competitors to get the goods or services they need. A disaster recovery plan prevents this.

Avoiding legal risks

In many industries, there are legal regulations that determine where data can be stored and how it should be protected. If these obligations are not met, heavy fines will arise.

Prevent data loss

Sistemas de empresa más poderá, más o risque de los datos. A solid FK plan minimizes this risk.

Protecting your reputation

A business that has difficulty summarizing operations after an outage can cause the brand to lose value. Therefore, a sound disaster recovery plan is critical.

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Google Cloud, including Cloud Storage, offers many solutions that can be used as a building block when creating a safe and stable disaster recovery plan. You can contact us for detailed information.