In a world where businesses need to operate continuously and maintain business continuity, having a disaster recovery plan is vital. In an ideal disaster recover plan, the recovery will happen automatically with no loss of data. It should cost nothing, and be instant with absolutely no effect on business operations. It should also be invisible to business clients.
A disaster recover plan has two accepted criteria, the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RTO is the time in which normality must be restored to the business. This should naturally be as short as possible. The RPO relates to the time taken for successfully restoring the data.
Often, not all data that is stored by a business is important. Most businesses choose not to segregate their data and prefer to have a backup of their entire data. It is important to classify and segregate the important data from the not so important data.
Any type of disaster recovery plan should include a copy or image of data, as it was prior to the disaster at a secondary location.
Disasters can strike any type of business at any time. They can be natural such as fires, floods or cyber-related such as viruses and server crashes. These can have severe consequences to the business, if unprepared. The key to successfully continuing to run the business operation immediately after a disaster is to have an effective recovery plan.
