Data center disaster recovery is an important part of managing your systems. Data centers can experience outages from natural disasters, power outages, fires, or cyberattacks. Without a proper plan that focuses on most important systems and recovery steps, businesses could experience disruptions and downtime that can be disastrous for your business.
Effective data center disaster recovery is essential for organizations to protect themselves from the adverse effects of a number of risks, that includes network and power outages, system failures, human error and cyber attacks. It is a primary component of the entire IT disaster recovery strategy.
This blog highlights the fundamentals of data disaster recovery, strategies to use, how to implement your disaster recovery plan, and best practices.
What is a Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan?
When disaster occurs, the data center disaster recovery plan lays out all the required steps to recover data, so that business operations get back to normal. This plan contains information on important data and systems, identification of potential threats and how to manage them, preventative measures to avoid disasters, and action plans for when the unexpected happens.
Types of Disasters That Can Impact Data Centers
Cyber attacks
Cyber attacks are a huge risk to businesses and they are not going away any time soon. It adds a layer of challenge to data center disaster recovery as some procedures like automatic failover may lead to duplication of ransomware or malware onto other sites. Even after ransoms are paid and hackers return access to systems, there is still a possibility of a long recovery process to retrieve systems and running.
Software failures and human error
Software bugs and misconfigurations by staff can result in outages that need disaster recovery. For instance, an update to code that has unexpected knock-on effects on customer-facing technology, is where the importance of regular backups comes in, that allows businesses to go back to an older version of the code without any presence of error.
Natural disasters
Natural disasters like fire, floods, earthquakes and others can impact data centers and cause them to go down, for example through a power outage. Certain measures can be taken to reduce this impact, such as locating data centers in low-risk areas and building in fire safety precautions and backup power generators. In the event of an outage caused by a natural disaster, rapid failover to a secondary site is required to reduce financial loss, maintain customer satisfaction and protect corporate reputation.
What Does Data Center Disaster Recovery Include?
Planning for data center disaster recovery includes the following steps:
- Conduct a risk assessment and business impact analysis to identify risky threats and vulnerabilities that could affect data centers and identify how to prioritize your systems and applications based on their severity and how much downtime is feasible for each of them.
- Create a disaster recovery plan, highlight the steps for responding to different types of disasters. Include roles and responsibilities across the team, a communications plan, and step-by-step recovery instructions for restoring data, applications, and systems. Store these plans in a central location and update them regularly so they are ready to go when disaster strikes.
- Ensure regular data backup is done and safely store it in multiple locations to prevent data loss during an outage. Implement redundant power supplies, network connections, and hardware to ensure continuous availability and lower single points of failure.
- Regularly test your data disaster recovery plan in a way that reflects how you would recover during a real incident, involving the people who would conduct the recovery in a real-life scenario.
- Collect data after every test and recovery to continuously monitor success and improve.
How Far Should the Data Centers be Located for Disaster Recovery?
A major part of your disaster recovery plan should include determining the perfect geographical locations for your data centers. If you are able to spread out the workloads to reside in more than one data center, you can have a location for failsafe which allows systems to switch over to the backup data center if the main site faces outage from a natural disaster or other incident.
An infographic displays how far the data centers should be for disaster recovery. For disaster recovery, you would want your data centers to be so far away that a natural disaster or major outage is not likely to affect both facilities simultaneously. There is no hard or fast rule for this, but a good guideline is to make sure the centers are at least 100 miles apart.
How to Plan an Effective Data Center Disaster Recovery Strategy
An effective data center disaster recovery strategy requires certain factors to consider which business operations are most important, how much downtime a business has , and how much data can be lost without major consequences. These can be defined using a business impact analysis to identify the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
Business Impact Analysis
In a business impact analysis, an organization can identify the systems and data that are important to business operations and must be protected during a disaster. This can help focus on redundancies and data resiliency, analyze what resources should be used to protect workloads and allocate the responsibilities in a disaster based on the impact on the business.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The amount of time it takes to restore systems after they are disrupted is called an RTO. This is the high amount of time a business can go without its critical systems and data. Some businesses are able to survive without their systems for longer than others. For example, retail businesses and smaller businesses can usually go longer with downtime compared to financial institutions or busy e-commerce businesses.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Not every business can afford to lose a day or even a minute. An RPO is a goal which is calculated by the maximum amount of data an organization can afford to lose. This can be described in minutes, hours, or days based on the type of data and the nature of the business.
Data Center Disaster Recovery Testing
Make sure that the recovery plans that are laid out are fully operational during disasters. DR testing helps you find any issues in your planning, thoroughly train the disaster recovery team on what to do in a real life scenario, and ensure everything is clearly conveyed and up to date. Full fledged testing should be done at least once a year..
Conclusion
Choosing a data center that focuses on disaster recovery and business continuity within their SLAs can help businesses be prepared for power outages and natural disasters. The businesses may need a data center for disaster recovery and business continuity plans. There are methods and best practices to implement the disaster recovery data center.
FAQs
What are the 4 pillars of disaster recovery?
The 4 components are data backup and recovery strategies, risk assessment and analysis, communication and crisis management plan, and training and preparedness exercises.
What is the most important step in disaster recovery?
The primary element of a disaster recovery plan is a documented procedure for responding to a catastrophic event. The first couple of hours of an event are critical, and staff should know clearly what to do to reduce damage to systems, and recover systems to resume normal operations.
What are the 4 C’s of disaster recovery?
The 4 C’s of disaster recovery – Communication, Coordination, Continuity, and Collaboration are the highlights of proper disaster preparedness and response. When faced with challenges such as fire and water damage, quick action is necessary.
