It might often cross your mind whether you should have a disaster recovery plan in place even if you have a robust backup system that ensures prompt data recovery.  To find an answer to this question you must have enough clarity about the working modality and objectives of the two processes and understand how it affects business. In an IT environment, recovery is an essential element of backup.  Whether your entire IT system has become defunct due to some unforeseen circumstances or you have lost some file due to careless deletion, your sole concern is about how to get back data and how soon can you do it. This is the time when you start wondering whether to focus on data recovery or disaster recovery.

If you look at the situation related to data inaccessibility that you are facing from the business perspective, you would realize that while recovering the data with the help of professional services in New York data recovery is indeed very important, it is not the end in itself. There is much more than business needs beyond getting back the critical information to ensure that the brief stoppage of the system does not cause any disruption of business. You need to have a disaster recovery plan to maintain business continuity. In this article, we will discuss the aspects of data recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity that would help to understand the processes better and enable proper implementation.

Data recovery

The process of recovering or restoring data from the backup when data becomes inaccessible from the IT system hardware like desktop, server, laptop or external storage devices is what data recovery means.  It comprises of a technical process that you can apply in many different ways depending on the software used to create a data backup and the manner of losing the data from the system.  By using the data recovery process, you should be able to recover data that got lost due to technical failure of the data storage system or due to accidental deletion and user negligence. Even to meet some audit compliance, it might be necessary to recover data from the backup.

With the help of experts, you can arrange for bare metal recovery of machines in the form of images as well as backup photos and virtual image based backup that you can use for data recovery to reduce downtime.  It would also allow seamless switching over of end user’s workloads when the data recovery process takes place.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is a term that encompasses a much more significant horizon of business that goes beyond data recovery.  It is interesting to note that disaster recovery is a part of business continuity and the thread that links data recovery with business continuity. Data restoration is only a part of disaster recovery, which also includes the plan that you have for protecting the business from disaster.  A good disaster recovery strategy and plan provides a structured approach in responding to unforeseen circumstances and incidents that pose a threat to the business infrastructure.

Planning for disaster recovery

Taking a methodical approach holds the key to devising an effective disaster recovery plan. Following these steps could help to create the proper plan.

  • Define the goals of the disaster recovery plan and identify the essential elements to include in it.  Include a plan overview that highlights the policy statement.

  • Specify what kind of actions to take in response to the emergency immediately when the incident happens.

  • Provide a diagram of the recovery site and the entire network.

  • Name the list of systems and software to use for the recovery process.

  • Make a list of actions for dealing with legal issues.

  • Mention the insurance coverage in a summarized form.

  • The contact information for disaster recovery team and key personnel.

Although disaster recovery might seem to have no link to data recovery, the demands of time have created expectations about zero downtime even when disaster strikes.

Business continuity

Business continuity has a much broader view of the business that takes into consideration operations and management of the facilities and staff thereby expanding the scope of maintenance, which goes far beyond than just recovering the equipment and data. The time it would take for recovery triggers some crucial questions about maintaining business continuity. How much time it takes to regain normalcy of various operations determine which data set needs more priority in the recovery plan and must be made available faster.  It also considers customer-centric data that is essential to assure them of business stability. Next is the data related to business partners followed by data related to vendors.

Data recovery is an integral part of disaster recovery planning that stems from a proper understanding of the business priorities that are essential to maintaining the continuity of business.

About the author: Andrew Nobilo is a software engineer who specializes in disaster recovery applications.  He has worked with companies like https://americantechpros.com/ and interested in writing on various topics of data recovery.  A sports-loving person, he is especially fond of soccer.