Disaster recovery is the process of creating and executing a plan that will minimize business interruptions after a crisis. It’s an essential part of every business, regardless of industry or size, because it helps ensure that critical systems are up and running again as quickly as possible after an unexpected event.
When a company’s systems go down, it can lead to data loss, lost productivity and costly out-of-budget expenses. It can also damage a company’s reputation among customers and clients. For example, a 2019 survey found that 41% of consumers would never return to a business that lost their data.
Businesses that prioritize disaster recovery can save money by reducing their downtime and the need for costly out-of-budget services, such as business continuity vendors or emergency communication platforms. In addition, it can help them improve their customer retention and client onboarding levels.
A successful disaster recovery strategy starts with identifying and defining the IT infrastructure and applications that are most important to the business. This can be done through a risk assessment, which evaluates the impact of different events on an organization’s IT infrastructure. It includes a definition of what is considered a disaster, the time frame for restoring critical systems and a set of measures that will be taken to prevent or respond to a disruption.
Once you have a clear idea of the IT infrastructure that needs protection, it’s time to consider DR tiers and the types of backups and recovery methods that will be used. The first step is to create a tier 1 disaster recovery site, which contains data backups but not preinstalled IT hardware and software. This can help reduce costs and recovery times, but it will still take more manual intervention and hardware configuration than a warm site, which has preinstalled systems that can be reactivated faster. disaster recovery