Disaster Recovery
From Encyclopedia of Cybersecurity
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery (DR) is the process of restoring and resuming normal business operations following a disruptive event that affects an organization's IT systems, infrastructure, or facilities. It involves implementing strategies, plans, and procedures to recover data, restore systems, and resume critical business functions in the event of a natural disaster, cyber attack, or other catastrophic events.
Objectives
The primary objectives of Disaster Recovery include:
- Minimizing Downtime: Minimizing the duration of service interruptions and downtime to ensure continuity of operations and minimize the impact on business productivity.
- Protecting Data: Safeguarding critical data, applications, and systems from loss, corruption, or unauthorized access during and after a disruptive event.
- Ensuring Compliance: Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, industry standards, and contractual obligations related to data protection, privacy, and business continuity.
- Mitigating Financial Losses: Minimizing financial losses, liabilities, and reputational damage associated with service disruptions, data breaches, and operational downtime.
- Maintaining Customer Confidence: Maintaining trust, confidence, and satisfaction among customers, partners, and stakeholders by demonstrating resilience and responsiveness during and after disruptive events.
Process
The Disaster Recovery process typically involves the following phases:
- Preparedness: Developing and implementing disaster recovery plans, procedures, and controls to ensure readiness for potential disasters or emergencies.
- Response: Activating and executing disaster recovery plans and procedures in response to a disruptive event, including data backup, system restoration, and crisis management.
- Recovery: Recovering and restoring IT systems, applications, data, and infrastructure to operational status following a disruptive event, often using redundant systems, backups, and failover mechanisms.
- Resumption: Resuming normal business operations and activities once the recovery process is complete, including communication with stakeholders, customers, and partners.
- Review and Improvement: Conducting post-incident reviews, lessons learned sessions, and continuous improvement efforts to enhance disaster recovery capabilities and resilience over time.
Strategies
Disaster Recovery strategies may include:
- Data Backup and Recovery: Regularly backing up critical data and systems to offsite or cloud-based storage, enabling rapid recovery in the event of data loss or corruption.
- High Availability and Redundancy: Implementing redundant systems, networks, and infrastructure to ensure continuous availability and failover capability during and after a disruptive event.
- Failover and Replication: Replicating critical systems and data across geographically dispersed locations to enable failover and rapid recovery in the event of a site failure or disaster.
- Business Continuity Planning: Developing and implementing comprehensive business continuity plans that address not only IT recovery but also operational, logistical, and personnel considerations.