Definition of Disaster Recovery Management

IT is great when things are going smoothly. VOIP, telephones, EDI for transmitting data will
handle the numerous day to day activities of an organization and nobody gives it a second
thought.  The problems begin when IT stops working.  When the data flow gets disrupted,
everything breaks loose and business efficiency is compromised.  This is when Disaster
Recovery Management comes into play.
Disaster Recovery Management involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the
recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following
a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology
systems supporting critical business functions, as opposed to business continuity, which
involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive
events. Disaster recovery relies upon the replication of data and computer processing in an
off-premises location that is not affected by the disaster. When servers go down because of a
natural disaster, equipment failure, or cyber-attack, a business needs to recover lost data from
a second location where the data is backed up. Ideally, an organization can transfer its
computer processing to that remote location as well to continue operations.

Types of Disaster Recovery Plans

 Virtualization Disaster Recovery
Virtualization greatly simplifies disaster recovery, since it does not require
rebuilding a physical server environment. Instead, you can move your virtual
machines over to another system and access them as normal.

 Network Disaster Recovery

Network recovery is the process of recovering and resorting normal working
operations on a computer network. It enables network administrators to regain
and restore operations on a network after going offline, being disconnected, crashing
or other events have stopped normal network operations

 Cloud-based Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery in cloud computing entails storing critical data and applications
in cloud storage and failing over to a secondary site in case of a disaster. Cloud
computing services are provided on a pay-as-you-go basis and can be accessed from
anywhere and at any time.

 Data center disaster recovery

The physical elements of a data center can protect data and contribute to faster disaster
recovery in certain types of disasters. For instance, fire suppression tools will help data and
computer equipment survive a fire. A backup power source will help businesses sail through
power outages without grinding operations to a halt. Unfortunately, none of these physical
disaster recovery tools will help in the event of a cyber attack.
 What are the benefits of disaster recovery software?
No organization can afford to ignore disaster recovery. The two most important benefits of
having a disaster plan in place are:
 Cost savings: Planning for disaster can save businesses hundreds of thousands of
dollars and can even mean the difference between surviving a natural disaster or folding. In a
recent research, it is shown that every $1 spent on disaster recovery management saves
society $4 in response and recovery costs.
 Faster recovery: Depending on the disaster recovery strategy and the types of
disaster recovery tools that are used, businesses can get up and running much faster after a
disaster, or even continue operations as if nothing had happened. Businesses without a
disaster recovery strategy and plan in place could easily be wiped out by a catastrophic flood
or hurricane, or be so affected by the price of a ransomware attack that they never recover.

Key Differences Between Backup and Disaster Recovery

Backup and disaster recovery cannot share an equal ground because backup is a lower-scale
data protection option and is usually a part of disaster recovery itself. However, if backup and
disaster recovery are compared in greater detail, there are several distinct differences that
exist between the two:
 Different Purposes. Backups work best when you need to gain access to a lost or
damaged file or object, such as an e-mail or a PowerPoint presentation. Backups are often
used for long-term data archival, or for purposes such as data retention. Basically, if you need
to store data or want to have something recovered, whether a single file or an entire VM,
simple backups are a helpful option. However, if you want your business to quickly restore
its functions after some unforeseen event, you should opt for disaster recovery. With both the
DR site and DR solution in place, you can simply perform failover to transfer workloads to
the VM replicas at the DR location, and your business can continue to function as normal
even if the production site is unavailable.
 Different RTO and RPO. Setting up Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery
Point Objective (RPO) is crucial for any business. The former is the amount of time in which
you need to recover your data after a disaster before any significant damage occurs, while the
latter is the maximum amount of data, measured in time, that your company can afford to lose
before suffering serious consequences. Determining RTO and RPO is crucial for both backup
and disaster recovery planning, however they significantly differ for both of these strategies.
 Backups have longer RTOs and RPOs and thus are not suitable for business-critical data that
you need restored after a disaster ASAP. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, implies
replicating your critical VMs with the aim of quickly performing failover if necessary, which
means that DR can accommodate much shorter RTOs and RPOs.
 The need for resources. Backups are usually stored in a compressed state and do not
require much attention or storage space. Depending on the media, such as tape, they may
require little to no additional costs at all and can be restored even years after the initial
backup. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, requires a separate site with fully operational IT
infrastructure that should always be ready for possible failover at any time.
 Comprehensive planning process. The backup process is rarely complicated: a
company simply needs to establish and stick to their Recovery Point Objectives as well as
requirements for data retention. With disaster recovery, things instantly become more
complicated. Besides the need for the additional resources mentioned earlier, a company
needs to evaluate the importance of business applications and prioritize the recovery order of
the VMs running such applications. For instance, the VM housing your CRM data is most
likely more important than the one which has HR data on it. Furthermore, every
comprehensive DR plan requires extensive testing, as failure to execute the plan during actual
disaster can have dire repercussions.
 https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/pros-cons-disaster-recovery-service
Types of Disaster Recovery Sites
There are three types of backup sites: cold sites, warm sites, and hot
sites. Let’s look at what each of the sites represents and what
differentiates them from one another.

Cold site
A cold site is a backup facility with little or no hardware equipment
installed. A cold site is essentially an office space with basic utilities
such as power, cooling system, air conditioning, and communication
equipment, etc. A cold site is the most cost-effective option among the
three disaster recovery sites. However, due to the fact that a cold site
doesn’t have any pre-installed equipment, it takes a lot of time to
properly set it up so as to fully resume business operations. In case of a
disaster, an organization would require help from IT personnel to
migrate necessary servers and make them functional in order to take
on the workload of the primary site.

Hot site
A hot site is a backup facility which represents a mirrored copy of the
primary production center. A hot site is equipped with all the necessary
hardware, software, and network connectivity, which allows you to
perform near real-time backup or replication of the critical data. This
way the production workload can be failed over to a DR site in a few
minutes or hours, thus ensuring minimal downtime and zero data loss.
A hot site is expected to be always online and running without
disruption so as to ensure data synchronization between the sites.
A hot site is the most expensive option among the three. Thus, it is
important to ensure that this type of a DR site is located far enough
from the production center. This way you can decrease the possibility
of a hot site being affected by the same disaster as the primary site.

Warm site
A warm site is considered the middle ground between the cold site and
the hot site. A warm site is a backup facility that has the network
connectivity and the necessary hardware equipment already pre-
installed. However, a warm site cannot perform on the same level as
the production center because they are not equipped in the same way.
Therefore, a warm site has less operational capacity than the primary
site. Moreover, data synchronization between the primary and the
secondary sites is performed daily or weekly, which can result in minor
data loss. A warm site is perfect for organizations which operate with
less critical data and can tolerate a short period of downtime. This type
of a DR site is the second most expensive option.
Below you can see the main features of disaster recovery sites and how
they compare.

Here are some major differences between backup as a service and disaster

recovery as a service:
 Power of recovery– In case of a failover, when your complete infrastructure needs
to be restored, disaster recovery gives you the power of switching to an alternate
environment. This ensures sustenance of business continuity and provides physical
resources required to bring the data online. Backups come handy when you need to
restore a document, hence provides an immediate access.
 Planning– A disaster recovery strategy requires a scaled out planning, which
includes determining mission critical systems, creation of recovery order and
communication process and a way to perform valid tests. Whereas, planning backup is
just a daily task and is simpler, as all it has to do is meet the data retention
requirements and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).
 Data Retention Requirements– Disaster recovery has to scale out the RTO
(Recovery Time Objective) to find out the amount of time the business can go on
without IT systems. Traditionally, RTO requires a duplicate of IT infrastructure in a
secondary location, so as to allow the replication between production and DR site. The
backup is a daily task in order to ensure data retention at a single location with the
purpose of copying data.
 Extra Required Resources– Disaster recovery simply needs an external production
environment for data to live. Everything about the current environment should be
considered from security to physical resources as well as connectivity and software.
Backup as we know is simply the copy of data which would be used to restore to the
original source.
https://graphs.net/data-loss-and-data-recovery.html

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nluJhvgog5I

Latest news: https://www.thestar.com.my/news/focus/2020/04/12/cybersecurity-cases-rise-by-825

https://www.comparitech.com/data-recovery-software/disaster-recovery-data-loss-
statistics/#What_is_disaster_recovery

https://www.infrascale.com/25-disaster-recovery-statistics-for-2015-infographic/

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References:

https://www.stayinbusiness.com/resource/it-disaster-recovery-management/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_recovery

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-management/disaster-recovery-planning.html

https://www.gowhiteowl.com/blog/virtualization-benefits-disaster-recovery/

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30721/network-disaster-recovery-plan

https://www.vmware.com/topics/glossary/content/disaster-recovery

https://www.nakivo.com/blog/overview-disaster-recovery-sites/