What is Disaster Recovery & why is it important?

What Is Disaster Recovery?

In IT, disaster recovery involves a series of actions to be taken in the event of major unplanned outages to minimize their adverse effects. Disasters can result from events such as

  • Hacker attacks
  • Computer viruses
  • Electrical power failures
  • Underground cable cuts or failures
  • Fire, flood, earthquake and other natural disasters at a facility
  • Mistakes in system administration

The related concept of business continuity involves insuring that an organization's critical business processes, including those utilizing IT systems, can be maintained in the event of a disaster.

Why Is Disaster Recovery Important?

When executed well, disaster recovery procedures save large sums of money. Disaster recovery can also improve the quality of human life, and it may even save lives.

The terrorist attacks of 11th September, for example, caused large-scale network outages. Among the affected systems were some of the fibre optic telecommunications services provided by Verizon. Besides the financial impact to Wall Street firms from lost data connectivity, the loss of voice contact with friends and family greatly affected many individuals on that day.

Planning for Disaster Recovery

The best approach to disaster recovery focuses primarily on planning and prevention. While the damage resulting from the events of 11th September could not have been anticipated, many other more typical disaster scenarios can be analysed in detail.

For those events that can't be prevented, an IT disaster recovery plan takes into account the need to

  • Detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible
  • Notify any affected parties so that they can take action
  • Isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread
  • Repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed
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How can Akhter help protect you?

Your network may fail for one of many reasons including hacker or virus attacks, power failures, natural disaster or simply an error in system administration. Akhter’s disaster recovery service will help to safeguard your data and the future of your company and minimise the effect of such failure.

Our strategy for protecting you is simple

We host a secure server at remote premises that mirrors the data and activity at your offices. In the event of your server failing, the mirrored server is accessible for you to continue working.

Remote Backup - for Disaster Events

Events that may bring your system to a complete halt on your site, will not affect the backup server running at our remote location. If your premises are so affected that they become unusable, your staff can continue to access their files from anywhere in the world via a broadband link and Akhter’s secure Virtual Private Network. This means that your business can continue with minimal disruption, with staff working from home or temporary offices while you assess the situation with regard to your premises.

Akhter’s RESTORE plan:

  • React to the disaster as soon as possible
  • Evaluate the effects
  • Switch to backup resource
  • Tell affected parties of progress
  • Obviate the spread of damage
  • Repair the damaged systems to resume normal service
  • Evaluate and communicate progress continually
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Remote Monitoring - for Every Day Events

As well as disaster scale events, there are other issues that may harm your network if not dealt with in time. These include viruses; spam email and other malicious threats. By monitoring your network remotely, Akhter can detect these and other technical irregularities in their early stages and act promptly, making fixes before they become a serious problem and without interruption to your workflow. Any interruptions to your network caused by breakages in cabling or similar breakdowns in the network infrastructure can be met with a fast response call out to our engineers.

Disaster Recovery Techniques

All good IT disaster recovery plans consider the three main components of operations:


  • data
  • systems
  • people

From the technical perspective, most organizations rely on some form of redundancy to make possible the recovery of data and systems. Redundancy allows secondary data or system resources to be pressed into service on short notice should primary resources fail or otherwise become unavailable.

Traditional backup strategies, for example, archive copies of critical data at a given point in time so that they can be restored later if needed. Organizations may also choose to replicate servers and other critical hardware at multiple locations to guard against any single point of failure. More advanced network technologies, like SONET, and some forms of clustering, incorporate built-in failover capabilities that attempt to automatically recover from some failures.

While these and similar approaches have been a part of IT practice for many years, more sophisticated disaster recovery techniques have grown in popularity due to the events of 11th September 2001.

Periodic data backups, for example, have limited value if the "snapshots" are not taken frequently enough. Some organizations now generate so much data that even daily backups are too infrequent.

Another recent trend in IT disaster recovery planning, third-party relocation services, gives organizations access to fully-equipped operations space at temporary facilities in remote locations. These facilities can be a wonderful option in times of crisis... if trained personnel are available to staff them.

Conclusion

Overall, the events of 11 September 2001 have reminded us of the prime concerns with IT disaster prevention, planning, and recovery today:

  • cost - comprehensive disaster recovery is extremely expensive
  • testability - disaster recovery plans that look great on paper but are technically unproven will likely fail in practice
  • overemphasis on the backoffice - without the people and the client-side infrastructure available, business still can't be done

The recent resurgence in focus on business continuity needs to be balanced against the practical considerations of the costs and non-business priorities involved.