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Why you need disaster recovery

Eva Simpson

Eva Simpson

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Apr 12, 2022

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6 min read

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Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning (BCP) have some similarities. They both require you to look at potential risks and ways to minimize their impact on your organization. But since BCP is much broader in scope, you may only need disaster recovery.

What is disaster recovery

To start, what is a disaster? To an individual, it could be an unforeseen natural force that has the power to destroy the person’s property. But businesses must look at disasters in a much broader sense. Because when we think about the scope of potential damage, there’s not much difference between an earthquake and ransomware. Not to mention that the Covid-19 pandemic has been a fatal disaster to businesses in almost every industry.

In other words, any event that can impede the organization's ability to operate is a disaster. Disaster recovery is a planned process to recover lost assets and resume operations efficiently. Disaster recovery is important even if you operate in a location that has never experienced a hurricane or an earthquake. Most companies must make money to survive, but first they need to survive to make money.

Also, many businesses can be subject to unique disasters like supply line shortages based on the materials they use.That’s why even the same event can have a profoundly different impact on neighboring businesses considering the resources and solutions available to each.

Types of disaster recovery

During disaster recovery planning, you will have to make a lot of decisions. Deciding on what types of recovery methods to use may be the hardest one. Whatever you choose will greatly impact the costs and time required to maintain and test your plan. Here are a few types of disaster recovery to consider:

  • Manual backups

  • The cheapest way to keep company data backed up is to back up data regularly yourself. The obvious disadvantage is the time it takes. However, it allows the company to create a custom solution that fits its needs.

  • Automatic backups

  • You can set up software or hire a third party to back up your data automatically. If you’re worried about another company gaining access to your data, use end-to-end encrypted backup services.

  • Point-in-time recovery

  • Similar to backups, these are snapshots of your databases made in regular intervals. If anything happens to your systems, you can restore your data to its exact state during the last snapshot.

  • Secondary locations

  • When considering recovery after natural disasters, a secondary location to operate from comes as a clear choice. However, the infrastructure itself, its setup, and maintenance can cost hundreds of times more compared to backup solutions.

The good news is that you don’t have to decide now. Planning in advance gives you enough time to scale up or down and test so that you find the best fit.

How to plan disaster recovery

Disasters can impact a company in multiple ways – from lost revenue due to lost clients and productivity to reputational damage and sometimes even attention from government watchdogs. That’s why the primary goal of an effective disaster recovery plan is to help a company resume business operations with minimal downtime. Here are several key parts that must be in every DR plan:

Assets

Evaluate the necessary assets the company cannot run without. In other words, everything you need to run your business, including critical infrastructure, services, and data as well as all the essentials like water and electricity.

Risks

Use your list of crucial company assets to identify threats that could damage the company. Devices can be stolen, servers can be broken into, and buildings can be flooded. Anything that could halt company operations should be on the list. In addition, consider your recovery time objective (RTO) or how much downtime the company could survive. It helps you create specific recovery goals and adjust measures to reach them.

Measures

After considering your business needs and potential risks, you should come up with recovery measures suitable to mitigate those risks. Outline all the steps that must be taken to both back up your systems and recover after a disaster.

Teams

Unlike a business continuity plan where everyone in the company is involved, disaster recovery needs a team of specialists responsible for implementing recovery measures. This team should know the plan inside out – from emergency communication channels to specific messages to the clients, customers, and employees.

Tests

When you first create your plan, you need to test it. Regularly performing tests with your disaster recovery team and company employees will help you optimize the process and ensure everyone is kept on their toes.

Disaster recovery and business continuity: What’s the difference?

Both business continuity and disaster recovery plans outline strategies to prevent disasters as well as help the company recover from damage. Both can cover natural and human-made disasters, and both rely on regular testing, training, and optimization to be effective. One major difference is scope. Business continuity takes into account even minor incidents like loss of a company device, while disaster recovery is more concerned with devastating events that could halt all business operations for days.

Disaster recovery

Business continuity

Helps businesses recover after a disaster and restore operations as they were.

Helps businesses survive during a time of crisis.

Includes training and safety precautions for employees.

Includes employee training.

Optimizes eliminating blocks stopping the company from running as usual.

Minimizes the amount of downtime.

Focuses on taking a business through a disaster and back to full capacity as soon as possible.

Focuses on preventing production or services being halted by ensuring at least minimal infrastructure is always available.

Can work as a standalone plan

Must include disaster recovery.

Why disaster recovery is important

Some may argue that disastrous events are rare. So rare, in fact, that it may be difficult to justify the costs of maintaining a disaster recovery team. But is this correct? Cybercrime alone is estimated to cost upwards of $7 trillion per year globally. Not to mention climate change and increasing risk of natural disasters. The only way to ensure the survival of your business is to prepare and invest in an effective disaster recovery plan. Despite the costs, the advantages are plentiful.

  • Less downtime

  • You never want to tell your clients your production is going offline. Investing in business recovery could help you get back on your feet before anyone even notices.

  • Limited damage

  • By clearly defining your most valuable assets, you can make sure they are attended to first, limiting the amount of damage you would sustain otherwise.

  • Cost-effective alternatives

  • If one of your supply lines broke down today, your immediate choices might not be the best. During a disaster, companies are often forced to pay through the nose even for the basic resources just to get up and running again. But planning in advance gives you the time to build connections and find truly the best alternatives.

  • Protected reputation

  • It’s more than the recovery of your lost data. A disaster recovery plan could make the difference between a massive reputational loss and escaping a catastrophe with a scratch.

  • Minimize casualties

  • When put into high-stress situations, people panic. Training for various scenarios helps people stay calm and efficient in your efforts to keep everyone safe.

  • Increased efficiency

  • Disaster recovery planning can even help you increase productivity today. To prepare for a disaster, you must go through all of your current systems and workflows. You’re bound to find processes that you can optimize to increase efficiency.

In other words, disaster recovery planning will help you identify processes that help as well as harm your preparedness. This allows you to trim the fat where necessary and ensure that your processes, infrastructure, communication, and planning are streamlined for maximum efficiency.

  • Staying compliant

  • Data privacy laws like the GDPR have kick-started local privacy laws in many countries worldwide. One thing they have in common is that they all implore companies to look after customer data better. That’s a big part of any good disaster recovery plan.

  • Reduce churn rates

  • It’s likely that individuals and companies rely on your business. If your infrastructure is down for a while, some of them will have to find alternatives.

Cloud-based recovery with NordLocker

NordLocker was first built to help preserve the privacy of our users and give them ownership of their data. But with increasing cybercrime rates, NordLocker is the perfect tool in your arsenal when you’re recovering from a disaster.

NordLocker secures data on a device and backs it up via a secure, end-to-end encrypted cloud. The drag-and-drop interface allows people of all skills to stay secure at minimum cost.

If your device is damaged, its data can be restored from backups anywhere in the world. In addition, NordLocker protects devices from unauthorized access if you are ever forced to leave them behind.

Eva Simpson

Eva Simpson

Verified author

Eva is usually the quiet one in the gang. But don’t let that silent demeanor fool you. She’s a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And when she’s not kicking butts, Eva loves to dissect complex tech topics in a way even 5-year olds would understand.