Disaster recovery

This article is about business continuity planning. For societal disaster recovery, see emergency management.

For other uses, see DR (disambiguation).

Disaster recovery involves a set of policies, tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems supporting critical business functions,^[1] as opposed to business continuity, which involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events. Disaster recovery can therefore be considered as a subset of business continuity.^[2][3]

Contents

• 
  1 History
  
  
  
  • 
    1.1 Classification of disasters
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  2 Importance of disaster recovery planning
  


• 
  3 Control measures
  


• 
  4 Strategies
  


• 
  5 Vendors
  


• 
  6 See also
  


• 
  7 References
  


• 
  8 Further reading
  


• 
  9 External links
  

History

Disaster recovery developed in the mid- to late 1970s as computer center managers began to recognize the dependence of their organizations on their computer systems. At that time, most systems were batch-oriented mainframes which in many cases could be down for a number of days before significant damage would be done to the organization.

As awareness of the potential business disruption that would follow an IT-related disaster, the disaster recovery industry developed to provide backup computer centers, with Sun Information Systems (which later became Sungard Availability Services) becoming the first major US commercial hot site vendor, established in 1978 in Sri Lanka.

During the 1980s and 90s, customer awareness and industry both grew rapidly, driven by the advent of open systems and real-time processing which increased the dependence of organizations on their IT systems. Regulations mandating business continuity and disaster recovery plans for organizations in various sectors of the economy, imposed by the authorities and by business partners, increased the demand and led to the availability of commercial disaster recovery services, including mobile data centers delivered to a suitable recovery location by truck.

With the rapid growth of the Internet through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, organizations of all sizes became further dependent on the continuous availability of their IT systems, with some organizations setting objectives of 2, 3, 4 or 5 nines (99.999%) availability of critical systems.^{[citation needed]} This increasing dependence on IT systems, as well as increased awareness from large-scale disasters such as tsunami, earthquake, flood, and volcanic eruption, spawned disaster recovery-related products and services, ranging from high-availability solutions to hot-site facilities. Improved networking meant critical IT services could be served remotely, hence on-site recovery became less important.

The rise of cloud computing since 2010 continues that trend: nowadays, it matters even less where computing services are physically served, just so long as the network itself is sufficiently reliable (a separate issue, and less of a concern since modern networks are highly resilient by design). 'Recovery as a Service' (RaaS) is one of the security features or benefits of cloud computing being promoted by the Cloud Security Alliance.^[4]

Classification of disasters

Disasters can be classified into two broad categories. The first is natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes. While preventing a natural disaster is impossible, risk management measures such as avoiding disaster-prone situations and good planning can help. The second category is man-made disasters, such as hazardous material spills, infrastructure failure, bio-terrorism, and disastrous IT bugs or failed change implementations. In these instances, surveillance, testing and mitigation planning are invaluable.

Importance of disaster recovery planning

Recent research supports the idea that implementing a more holistic pre-disaster planning approach is more cost-effective in the long run. Every $1 spent on hazard mitigation(such as a disaster recovery plan) saves society $4 in response and recovery costs.^[5]

2015 disaster recovery statistics suggest that downtime lasting for one hour can cost

• small companies as much as $8,000,


• mid-size organizations $74,000, and


• large enterprises $700,000.^[6]
  

As IT systems have become increasingly critical to the smooth operation of a company, and arguably the economy as a whole, the importance of ensuring the continued operation of those systems, and their rapid recovery, has increased. For example, of companies that had a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen and 29% close within two years. As a result, preparation for continuation or recovery of systems needs to be taken very seriously. This involves a significant investment of time and money with the aim of ensuring minimal losses in the event of a disruptive event.^[7]

Control measures

Control measures are steps or mechanisms that can reduce or eliminate various threats for organizations. Different types of measures can be included in disaster recovery plan (DRP).

Disaster recovery planning is a subset of a larger process known as business continuity planning and includes planning for resumption of applications, data, hardware, electronic communications (such as networking) and other IT infrastructure. A business continuity plan (BCP) includes planning for non-IT related aspects such as key personnel, facilities, crisis communication and reputation protection, and should refer to the disaster recovery plan (DRP) for IT related infrastructure recovery / continuity.

IT disaster recovery control measures can be classified into the following three types:

1. Preventive measures – Controls aimed at preventing an event from occurring.


2. Detective measures – Controls aimed at detecting or discovering unwanted events.


3. Corrective measures – Controls aimed at correcting or restoring the system after a disaster or an event.

Good disaster recovery plan measures dictate that these three types of controls be documented and exercised regularly using so-called "DR tests".

Strategies

Prior to selecting a disaster recovery strategy, a disaster recovery planner first refers to their organization's business continuity plan which should indicate the key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for various business processes (such as the process to run payroll, generate an order, etc.)^[8]. The metrics specified for the business processes are then mapped to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes.^[9]

Incomplete RTOs and RPOs can quickly derail a disaster recovery plan. Every item in the DR plan requires a defined recovery point and time objective, as failure to create them may lead to significant problems that can extend the disaster’s impact.^[10] Once the RTO and RPO metrics have been mapped to IT infrastructure, the DR planner can determine the most suitable recovery strategy for each system. The organization ultimately sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget. While most business unit heads would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection may make the desired high availability solutions impractical. A cost-benefit analysis often dictates which disaster recovery measures are implemented.

Traditionally, a disaster recovery system involved cutover or switch-over recovery systems.^{[citation needed]} Such measures would allow an organization to preserve its technology and information, by having a remote disaster recovery location that produced backups on a regular basis. However, this strategy proved to be expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, more affordable and effective cloud-based systems were introduced.

Some of the most common strategies for data protection include:

• backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals


• backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk, or made directly to off-site disk


• replication of data to an off-site location, which overcomes the need to restore the data (only the systems then need to be restored or synchronized), often making use of storage area network (SAN) technology


• Private Cloud solutions which replicate the management data (VMs, Templates and disks) into the storage domains which are part of the private cloud setup. These management data are configured as an xml representation called OVF (Open Virtualization Format), and can be restored once a disaster occurs.


• Hybrid Cloud solutions that replicate both on-site and to off-site data centers. These solutions provide the ability to instantly fail-over to local on-site hardware, but in the event of a physical disaster, servers can be brought up in the cloud data centers as well.


• the use of high availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data, even after a disaster (often associated with cloud storage)^[11]
  

In many cases, an organization may elect to use an outsourced disaster recovery provider to provide a stand-by site and systems rather than using their own remote facilities, increasingly via cloud computing.

In addition to preparing for the need to recover systems, organizations also implement precautionary measures with the objective of preventing a disaster in the first place. These may include:

• local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID
  


• surge protectors — to minimize the effect of power surges on delicate electronic equipment


• use of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and/or backup generator to keep systems going in the event of a power failure


• fire prevention/mitigation systems such as alarms and fire extinguishers


• anti-virus software and other security measures

Vendors

Several large hardware vendors have developed mobile/modular solutions that can be installed and made operational in very short time.

A modular data center connected to the power grid at a utility substation

• 
  Cisco Systems,^[12]
  


• 
  Sun Microsystems (Sun Modular Datacenter),^[13][14]
  


• 
  Bull (mobull),^[15]
  


• 
  IBM (Portable Modular Data Center),


• 
  Schneider-Electric (Portable Modular Data Center),


• 
  HP (Performance Optimized Datacenter),^[16]
  


• 
  ZTE Corporation,


• 
  FiberHome Technologies Group (FitMDC Modular Data Center Solution), ^[17]
  


• 
  Huawei (Container Data Center Solution),^[18]
  


• 
  Google (Google Modular Data Center) have developed systems that could be used for this purpose.^[19][20]
  


• BASELAYER has a patent on the software defined modular data center.^[21][22]
  

See also

• Backup site


• Business continuity


• Continuous data protection


• Data recovery


• Disaster response


• Emergency management


• High availability


• IT service continuity


• Information System Contingency Plan


• Remote backup service


• Seven tiers of disaster recovery


• Virtual tape library

References

1. 
   ^ Systems and Operations Continuity: Disaster Recovery. Georgetown University. University Information Services. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
   


2. 
   ^ Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, version 2011. Archived January 11, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. IBM. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
   


3. 
   ^ [1] 'What is Business Continuity Management', DRI International, 2017
   


4. 
   ^ SecaaS Category 9 // BCDR Implementation Guidance CSA, retrieved 14 July 2014.
   


5. 
   ^ "Post-Disaster Recovery Planning Forum: How-To Guide, Prepared by Partnership for Disaster Resilience". University of Oregon's Community Service Center, (C) 2007, www.OregonShowcase.org. Retrieved October 29, 2018..mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output q{quotes:"""""""'""'"}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}
   


6. 
   ^ "The Importance of Disaster Recovery". Retrieved October 29, 2018.
   


7. 
   ^ "IT Disaster Recovery Plan". FEMA. 25 October 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
   


8. 
   ^ The Professional Practices for Business Continuity Management, Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRI), 2017
   


9. 
   ^ Gregory, Peter. CISA Certified Information Systems Auditor All-in-One Exam Guide, 2009.
   ISBN 978-0-07-148755-9. Page 480.
   


10. 
    ^ "Five Mistakes That Can Kill a Disaster Recovery Plan". Dell.com. Archived from the original on 2013-01-16. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
    


11. 
    ^ Brandon, John (23 June 2011). "How to Use the Cloud as a Disaster Recovery Strategy". Inc. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
    


12. 
    ^ "Info and video about Cisco's solution". Datacentreknowledge. May 15, 2007. Archived from the original on 2008-05-19. Retrieved 2008-05-11.
    


13. 
    ^ "Technical specs of Sun's Blackbox". Archived from the original on 2008-05-13. Retrieved 2008-05-11.
    


14. 
    ^ And English Wiki article on Sun's modular datacentre
    


15. 
    ^ Kidger, Daniel. "Mobull Plug and Boot Datacenter". Bull. Archived from the original on 2010-11-19. Retrieved 2011-05-24.
    


16. 
    ^ "HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) 20c and 40c - Product Overview". H18004.www1.hp.com. Retrieved 2013-08-30.
    


17. 
    ^ "FitMDC Modular Data Center Solution".
    


18. 
    ^ "Huawei's Container Data Center Solution". Huawei. Retrieved 2014-05-17.
    


19. 
    ^ Kraemer, Brian (June 11, 2008). "IBM's Project Big Green Takes Second Step". ChannelWeb. Archived from the original on 2008-06-11. Retrieved 2008-05-11.
    


20. 
    ^ "Modular/Container Data Centers Procurement Guide: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Quick Deployment" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-31. Retrieved 2013-08-30.
    


21. 
    ^ Slessman, George (May 7, 2013), System and method of providing computer resources, retrieved 2016-02-24
    


22. 
    ^ "Modular Data Center Firm IO to Split Into Two Companies". Data Center Knowledge. Retrieved 2016-02-24.
    

Further reading

• ISO/IEC 22301:2012 (replacement of BS-25999:2007) Societal Security – Business Continuity Management Systems – Requirements


• ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (replacement of ISO/IEC 27001:2005 [formerly BS 7799-2:2002]) Information Security Management System


• ISO/IEC 27002:2013 (replacement of ISO/IEC 27002:2005 [renumbered ISO17799:2005]) Information Security Management – Code of Practice


• ISO/IEC 22399:2007 Guideline for incident preparedness and operational continuity management


• ISO/IEC 24762:2008 Guidelines for information and communications technology disaster recovery services


• 
  The Professional Practices for Business Continuity Management, Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRI), 2017


• IWA 5:2006 Emergency Preparedness—British Standards Institution –


• BS 25999-1:2006 Business Continuity Management Part 1: Code of practice


• BS 25999-2:2007 Business Continuity Management Part 2: Specification


• BS 25777:2008 Information and communications technology continuity management – Code of practice—Others –


• "A Guide to Business Continuity Planning" by James C. Barnes


• "Business Continuity Planning", A Step-by-Step Guide with Planning Forms on CDROM by Kenneth L Fulmer


• "Disaster Survival Planning: A Practical Guide for Businesses" by Judy Bell


• ICE Data Management (In Case of Emergency) made simple – by MyriadOptima.com


• Harney, J.(2004). Business continuity and disaster recovery: Back up or shut down.


• AIIM E-Doc Magazine, 18(4), 42–48.


• Dimattia, S. (November 15, 2001).Planning for Continuity. Library Journal,32–34.

External links

• IT Disaster Recovery Plan from Ready.gov


• The Professional Practices for Business Continuity Management from Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRI)

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