Have you ever wondered what you'd do if your computer suddenly crashed and all your files vanished? Imagine the same scenario unfolding on a larger scale, affecting your entire business.
These are the moments when IT disaster recovery becomes your knight in shining armor.
IT disaster recovery answers questions like these, allowing you to respond to system failures and minimize downtime. Downtime costs your business time, data, profits, and your company's reputation.
Understanding what is involved in disaster recovery can help you construct an effective disaster recovery plan and address possible outages and issues in the future.
For over 25 years, WEBIT Services has helped hundreds of clients identify risks, develop IT disaster recovery plans, and recover clients' data and systems.
By the end of this article, you will learn what an IT disaster is, how disaster recovery helps, and what the recovery process looks like.
Defining IT Disasters
An IT disaster is any event that sends your critical IT systems offline. These events can range from natural disasters, like floods or fires, to cyberattacks, hardware failures, or even someone accidentally unplugging a server.
If it results in your IT systems, and subsequently your business, grinding to a halt, you're dealing with an IT disaster.
Types of IT disasters include:
- Natural or Unnatural Disasters: These can damage your facilities or equipment, rendering your IT systems inoperable.
- Cyberattacks: Malicious software that steals information or locks your system (i.e., ransomware attacks that hijack your data and systems, holding them hostage until you pay a hefty ransom).
- Hardware, Software, or Network Failures: Even the most robust systems can fail due to technical glitches or hardware breakdowns.
- Deletion of Critical Data: Accidentally or maliciously, the loss of crucial data can bring your operations to a standstill.
How IT Disaster Recovery Comes to the Rescue:
Picture this: your systems are down, and your business is in jeopardy. This is where IT disaster recovery swoops in to save the day.
If you're familiar with cybersecurity frameworks like NIST and CIS, you'll recognize that "recovery" is the final step in the cybersecurity cycle. It's the phase where you regain control and restore your data and systems, allowing your business to keep moving forward.
However, here's the crucial part: the speed you can recover is directly related to how well you've planned for such disasters.
Having an IT disaster recovery plan can significantly expedite the process, minimizing downtime, lost profits, and damage to your business reputation.
Disaster recovery works to bring your system back online and restore its data and functionality. Whether a crisis wipes your system's memory, corrupts files, or removes vital software and data, disaster recovery acts as the glue that binds everything back together.
IT disaster recovery employs one of two strategies: backups and IT continuity, often using a combination of both.
IT Backups
- File Backups: These capture individual files but exclude operating systems and applications. For instance, a file backup will save your important documents but won't restore the applications used to create those documents. You'll need extra time to reinstall applications and configure settings.
- Image Backups: Image backups, on the other hand, take a snapshot of your entire system, including the operating system, files, and applications at a specific moment in time. While these backups still require some time to activate, they are quicker than file backups because all applications and settings are ready to go.
For example, if you have a file backup, it would save a Microsoft Word document. In contrast, an image backup saves the document and the Microsoft Word application, making recovery smoother.
IT Continuity
IT continuity is a critical component of business continuity plans. It aims to quickly restore essential IT systems, workflows, and data to minimize productivity disruptions.
While backups primarily focus on safeguarding your data, IT continuity goes further, prioritizing the rapid restoration of critical IT systems to ensure your business can continue functioning seamlessly.
The IT Disaster Recovery Process
The specific steps of an IT disaster recovery process may vary depending on the nature of the disaster. However, the core concepts remain consistent across different scenarios.
To restore IT functionality, you will typically:
- Evaluate What Needs Replacing: Identify the hardware or software that needs replacing to restore functionality.
- Purchase and Activate Replacement Technology: If required, procure and activate the necessary technology.
- Restore Data and Systems Using Backups: Utilize your backup systems to restore lost data and system configurations.
Although these steps may seem straightforward, the recovery process can become quite complex, especially without a well-thought-out incident response or IT disaster recovery plan. Having a plan in place significantly expedites the recovery, ensuring minimal disruption.
A Tale of Two Companies: IT Disaster Planning vs. No Planning
To truly grasp the significance of IT disaster recovery planning, let's look at two hypothetical scenarios.
We have two companies who both have their main server crash. Servers are crucial parts of an IT system. If a server goes down, it will cripple the entire IT system until it is restored.
In our examples, Company A has prepared for an IT disaster like a crashed server, while Company B has not prepared. What does their recovery look like?
Company A: Prepared for Disaster
Before the server crashes, Company A has a robust business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan in place. They anticipated the possibility of a server failure and prepared accordingly.
They had a secondary server and an IT continuity system for critical operations. As a result, they were able to get back online quickly. While a full recovery might take some time, they continued to produce goods and services with minimal downtime.
Company A's process looked like this:
- Activate a new server.
- Activate critical systems using IT continuity.
- Restore critical data using backups.
Company B: No Disaster Recovery Plan
Company B, on the other hand, did not have a BCDR plan when their server crashed. Consequently, they had to go through a much more time-consuming process. Their recovery journey without IT continuity looked like this:
- Research and search for a new server.
- Purchase a new server.
- Receive the new server, accounting for potential delays.
- Configure the new server from the ground up.
- Connect the new server to the network.
- Install applications.
- Recover data using backup files or rebuild lost data from scratch.
However, if Company B had image backups, setting up a new server would have been much faster, taking an hour or less. Their process with image backups would resemble the following:
- Research and search for a new server.
- Purchase a new server.
- Receive the new server.
- Install image backups to restore applications, data, and programming.
In summary, the difference between Company A and Company B is staggering. Company B faced potential downtime ranging from 24 hours to over a month, depending on hardware availability and backup style.
Taking the Next Steps: Creating Your IT Disaster Recovery Plan
IT disaster recovery is about bringing your systems back online when disaster strikes. The recovery speed depends on your planning, available resources, and the time it takes to restore data, programs, settings, and applications. The more prepared you are and the more resources you have, the faster your recovery will be.
Consider creating and implementing an incident response or disaster recovery plan to prepare for worst-case scenarios. These plans are your shield against downtime, lost profits, and damage to your business reputation.
Work with your IT provider or internal IT team to build a recovery plan tailored to your organization's immediate needs and IT budget. As circumstances change, revisit and adjust your plan accordingly.
Your IT provider or internal IT team can help you build a recovery plan. If you're unsure if you have a plan, ask your provider, "Do we have recovery plans, and are these aligned with real, plausible risks?"
Your plan will consider your immediate needs and IT budget to build the most effective strategy for your organization. If your circumstances change, you can revisit and adjust the plan accordingly.
WEBIT Services has been performing risk assessments, creating incident response plans, and enacting IT strategies for satisfied clients for over 25 years.
If you're looking for a new IT provider, book a free 30-minute assessment to see how WEBIT services can help.
If you're not ready to make a commitment but would like to learn more about IT strategies like disaster recovery, we recommend the following articles:
- How to determine critical IT systems for an IT service continuity plan
- What is an incident response plan, and do you need one?
- Backup and Recovery Systems | What they are, and why you need one
- Data Backup vs. IT Continuity
