Disaster, as we all know is a sudden disruption in the normalcy cycle. But this is defined in a much broader sense applying to all forms of routines. When it comes to IT based sector, Disaster is a situation wherein the work load has been abruptly discontinued due to some unforeseen circumstances. Disaster Recovery (DR) is the methodology to schematically approach the process of recovering from the immediate disaster faced.
Principle Steps:
- Act right Act fast
The basic step towards handling a DR is to act swiftly so as the data doesn’t corrupt. The major issue with a disaster is that the data in your local server gets corrupted with no firewall to protect it, thus leaving it imminent to hackers for data theft.
- A strong RPO and RTO
RPO is Recovery point objective. In simple words it means the point of extent to which the data has been damaged and the point from which the data can be recovered. This is a metric measurement system which assesses how quickly and efficiently you have to recover your frozen data from the disaster. RPO is vital since it not only indicated the amount of data available but also helps in valuating the measures to recover frozen and lost data and raise the firewall for the remaining data available.
RTO is Recovery Time Objective. This specifically focuses on the time required to recover lost, tampered and frozen data in the local server or the cloud. RTO gives us the clarity about the extent of damage a certain disaster has cost you and the magnitude to which the service has been disrupted. RTO emphasises on the requirement of time to build the functionality of the servers or cloud precisely for business continuity. RTO, when cumulatively collected, could be useful for appropriate protections for future data handling during disasters.
The RPO and RTO both fall under the sae category of data handling when it comes to DR. a suitable plan and testing of the plan should assess the quality of steps and measures that could be used during the time of a disaster.
- Service DRaaS
DRaaS also known as Disaster Recovery as a Service is a schematic procedure to every IT infrastructure to recover after any pertaining disaster. A disaster could be of any form, a cloud being dysfunctional due to overload, a power shut down, a natural disaster around the geographic locality of a local or service cloud server.
DRaaS helps you to come as close as to figure out uninterrupted operations post disaster occurrences. This directly refers to a completely managed solution that allows to restore MSPs and customer’s data and IT infrastructure in case of a disaster that disrupts and possibly completely stops the functionalities of servers, disks and clouds. The damaged disk’s retrieval is a questionable outcome but with planned DRaaS, we can achieve the restoration of cloud and server data. A 30-minute downtime due to disaster cost 2 million dollars for a certain multi national company in the year of 2013, this doesn’t apply only for highly grossing tech firms but for companies of any size that rely on data and servers. Only a planned DRaaS can help meet ends of post disaster functionality and regular routine of the company.
Cloud DR System
Again, cloud systems are completely located in area of low probability with respect to natural disaster. Yet it is always wise to sketch out a worst-case scenario for data backup and Disaster Recovery.
Every company has a local server which is within the bounds of the location of the company and that server mostly pertains the data of staff and regular operations taken in time. However, having a backed-up copy of that serve in a cloud is advisable since there is always data theft in these times.
Business continuity planning is vital for large scale companies and specially for production companies as the data for production scale is vital and cannot suffer the risk of spill. Hence, having a cloud copy and a firewall with the help of a well-articulated DRaaS helps to recover quickly and efficiently.
Why Have A Cloud DR?
Primarily the amount of data that needs to sit permanently can be marginalised and scaled with expansion if comes to cloud computing since there is virtually no limit to the amount of data that can be stored. Depending on the size of the infrastructure of your company, the size of cloud capacity can be scaled. Nevertheless, the data size that’s being bought can always be expanded.
No upfront investment is needed for disaster management. You needn’t physically buy a piece of land or an office area to set up serves and you can pay only when you want more data capacity from the cloud. It is advisable to expand the storage to the maximum of 30% to avoid last minute storage considerations. Since there is no upfront investment, small scale companies hat rely on cloud computing and virtual computers needn’t carry the burden of extra cost for storage when compared to setting up an exclusive server.
Geographical leverage needn’t be considered as there is no physical servers mounted for this purpose. Any data that has been disrupted by the server in office could be saved by immediately replacing it with the back up data stored in the cloud. This however consumes higher rates of RTO but the scale of damage to the data can be cut down.
In case of cloud disaster, there are certain ways to consider on the methods to go about it. There’s Backup and recovery which prominently deals with backing up everything to the cloud and recovering it in case of disaster. Other methods like Pilot Light and Warm standby deals with same concepts but always keep the data running in the background. These latter methods require high data storage capacity to function with.
The worst-case scenario for an enterprise or a company is let lose of the consumer’s data. Building back the reputation post disaster is a tedious process, but when sketched with the right tools, an achievable one.
