Data Recovery Digest

A Disaster Recovery Plan or DRP is a comprehensive plan that provides guidance to various levels of staff on what to do in case of a natural disaster or other emergency. Data is one of the most valuable resources that most businesses have, and using it well can be the difference between success and struggle. A plan for crises is a major part of smarter data use and protection of this core resource.


Establishing a Disaster Recovery Plan

In most cases, a DRP for an enterprise will involve a number of top-level goals including comprehensive security, critical maintenance for any standby systems involved in the plan, and specific support for individual business processes. One of the first steps of planning should include risk assessment that works as a kind of “orientation” to establish exactly what services the business would need in the event of a disruption at a particular physical location.

Safeguarding Data in a Disaster Recovery Plan

Along with the broader goals involved in setting up emergency decision-making and directives for employees, there is the necessity of both safeguarding the existing data used in local business operations, and accounting for any change that happens directly after a disrupting event. Businesses use diverse methods of data backup and recovery, as well as different media for data storage. Whether data storage is done on tape, solid state media, or traditional hard disk drives, the business must consider how to implement data backup that provides for changes since the previous backup, in order to best serve the business process.

In order to protect data and keep it “operational” in a crisis, businesses have developed sophisticated systems for migrating that data to standby hardware. For instance, a process called failback and failover establishes two stages for migrating data: first, new data is redirected to a functional standby facility when the original hardware is compromised. Then, that new data or “change data” is sent back to the original source. This allows for effective data recovery so that business processes can keep right on going through the failure of a single hardware setup.

Application Recovery

Along with the need to safeguard valuable data, businesses also need to have a plan in place to re-boot processes with adequate application recovery support, so that software programs will be able to continue operation after a crisis. Business leaders will need to identify which software systems are “mission critical” and develop a strategy to re-start them off-site or otherwise work around a disaster. As with other aspects of the DRP, application recovery will often involve a “notification” phase where good planning involves keeping any regular users, like suppliers or vendors, in-the-know, while implementing a return to business as usual, connecting new programs in runtime with the current data that they need.

Businesses needing to prepare for the eventuality of an emergency situation often work with specialized third party services to create customized disaster recovery plans. Another alternative is to build one of these detailed plans using in-house IT departments and input from senior management. Either way, having one of these plans in place helps to protect some of the most valuable assets involved in the operation of modern companies, including carefully collected data and the software architectures that serve particular business processes.