How to Build a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy

Whether your industry faces challenges from geopolitical conflict, the fallout from a global pandemic, or the growing aggressiveness of the cybersecurity landscape, the threat vector for the modern enterprise is undeniably powerful. A disaster recovery strategy provides a framework for team members to get their business back up and running after an unplanned event occurs.

It’s no surprise that disaster recovery strategies are growing in popularity around the world. According to a recent report from International Data Corporation (IDC), enterprises spent $219 billion on cybersecurity and solutions alone last year, a 12% increase from 2022 (link resides outside ibm.com).

A disaster recovery strategy sets out how a business can respond to many unplanned incidents. A strong disaster recovery strategy consists of a disaster recovery plan (DR plan), business continuity plan (BCP), and incident response plan (IRP). These documents can help your business prepare to face a variety of threats, including power outages, ransomware and malware attacks, and natural disasters.

What is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a detailed document that describes how a business will respond to different types of disasters. Typically, companies either deploy DRP themselves or outsource the disaster recovery process to a third-party DRP vendor. Along with business continuity plans (BCPs) and incident response plans (IRPs), DRPs play a critical role in the effectiveness of your disaster recovery strategy.

What is your business continuity plan and incident response plan?

Like DRP, both BCP and IRP are part of a larger disaster recovery strategy that can help businesses restore normal operations in the event of a disaster. BCP typically takes a broader look at threats and remediation options than DRP and focuses on what a company needs to do to restore connectivity. IRP is a type of DRP that focuses solely on cyber attacks and threats to IT systems. IRP clearly outlines an organization’s real-time emergency response from the moment a threat is detected through mitigation and remediation.

Why It’s Important to Have a Disaster Recovery Strategy

Disasters can impact businesses in a variety of ways, creating all kinds of complex problems. From earthquakes that impact physical infrastructure and worker safety to cloud service outages that block access to sensitive data storage and customer services, having a sound disaster recovery strategy will help your business recover quickly. The biggest benefits of building a strong disaster recovery strategy include:

• Maintain business continuity: Business continuity and business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) provide data protection, data backup, and other critical services to ensure your organization can return to normal operations after an unplanned event.
• cut down the money: According to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million, a 15% increase over the past three years. Businesses that fail to have a disaster recovery strategy in place risk incurring costs and penalties far greater than the savings they would have by not investing in a solution.
• Reduce downtime: Modern businesses rely on complex technologies such as cloud-based infrastructure solutions and cellular networks. Disruption of business operations due to unplanned incidents can cost millions of dollars. Additionally, disruptions caused by high-profile cyberattacks, lengthy downtime, or human error can send customers and investors fleeing.
• Maintain compliance: Businesses operating in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare and personal finance face hefty fines and penalties for data breaches due to the importance of the data they manage. Having a strong disaster recovery strategy will help speed up the response and recovery process after an unplanned incident. This is very important in a sector where monetary fines are often determined by the duration of the infringement.

How a Disaster Recovery Strategy Works

The most powerful disaster recovery strategies prepare your business to face a variety of threats. A robust template for restoring normal operations can help build investor and customer confidence and increase the likelihood of recovery from any threats your business faces. Before we look at the actual components of a disaster recovery strategy, let’s review some key terms.

• failover/failover: Failover is a widely used process in IT disaster recovery in which work is moved to a secondary system when the primary system fails due to a power outage, cyberattack, or other threat. Failover is the process of switching back to the original system after normal processes are restored. For example, an enterprise can failover from a data center to a secondary site where redundant systems start up immediately. When done correctly, failover/failback can create a seamless experience where users/customers don’t even realize they are moving to a secondary system.
• Recovery time objective (RTO): RTO refers to the time it takes to restore business operations after an unexpected incident. Setting a reasonable RTO is one of the first things companies should do when developing a disaster recovery strategy.
• Recovery point goal (RPO): Your business’s RPO is the amount of data you can afford to lose and recover. Some companies continuously copy data to remote data centers to ensure continuity. Others find that they can set an acceptable RPO of a few minutes (or even hours) and recover anything lost during that time.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): DRaaS is a disaster recovery approach that is gaining popularity as awareness of the importance of data security grows. Companies taking a DRaaS approach to disaster recovery are essentially outsourcing their disaster recovery plan (DRP) to a third party. This third party hosts and manages the infrastructure needed for recovery, then creates and manages response plans and ensures that business-critical operations can resume quickly. According to a recent report by Global Market Insights (GMI) (link resides outside ibm.com), the DRaaS market size was valued at $11.5 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow by 22% in the coming years.

5 Steps to Building a Strong Disaster Recovery Strategy

Disaster recovery planning begins with an in-depth analysis of your most critical business processes, known as business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment (RA). Every business is different and has unique needs, but there are a few steps you can take to help ensure an effective disaster recovery plan, regardless of size or industry.

Step 1: Perform a business impact analysis

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a careful assessment of all the threats facing a company along with their possible consequences. Strong BIA looks at how threats can impact day-to-day operations, communication channels, worker safety, and other critical parts of the business. Some examples of factors to consider when conducting a BIA include lost revenue, downtime and costs, reputational repair costs (publicity), loss of customer or investor confidence (both short-term and long-term), and penalties you may face due to: there is. Non-compliance due to disruption.

Step 2: Perform a risk analysis

Threats vary greatly depending on your industry and the type of business you operate. Conducting a sound risk analysis (RA) is an important step in developing a strategy. You can evaluate each potential threat individually by considering two things: likelihood of occurrence and potential impact on business operations. There are two widely used methods for this: qualitative risk analysis and quantitative risk analysis. Qualitative risk analysis is based on perceived risk, while quantitative analysis is performed using verifiable data.

Step 3: Create an asset inventory

Disaster recovery depends on having a complete picture of all assets your business owns. This includes hardware, software, IT infrastructure, data, and everything else that is critical to running your business. Three labels that are widely used to classify assets are:

• critical: Label assets only critical As necessary for normal business operations.
• important: Assign this label to assets that your business uses at least once a day. Any disruption may impact (but not completely disrupt) our business operations.
• Not important: These are assets that are not essential to normal business operations but are not frequently used by the business.

Step 4: Set roles and responsibilities

Clearly assigning roles and responsibilities is probably the most important part of your disaster recovery strategy. Without it, no one would know what to do in the event of a disaster. Actual roles and responsibilities will vary greatly depending on company size, industry, and business type, but any recovery strategy should include several roles and responsibilities:

• Incident reported by: The individual responsible for communicating with stakeholders and relevant authorities when a disruptive event occurs and maintaining up-to-date contact information for all involved parties.
• Disaster Recovery Plan Manager: The DRP Manager ensures that your disaster recovery team members perform their assigned tasks and that the strategies you have established are executed smoothly.
• Asset Manager: When a disaster occurs, someone should be assigned the role of protecting critical assets and reporting back on status throughout the incident.

Step 5: Test and improve

To ensure that your disaster recovery strategy is sound, it must be continuously practiced and regularly updated for meaningful changes. For example, if a company acquires new assets after establishing a DRP strategy, they should be included in the plan to protect them. Testing and improving your disaster recovery strategy can be broken down into three simple steps:

1. Create accurate simulations: When rehearsing your DRP, try to create an environment that is close to real-life scenarios your company will face, without putting anyone at physical risk.
2. Identify the problem: Use the DRP testing process to identify flaws and inconsistencies in your plan, simplify the process, and resolve any issues related to your backup procedures.
3. Test your disaster recovery procedures. While it is important to know how you will respond to an incident, it is equally important to test the procedures you have in place to restore critical systems after an incident. Test how to turn your network back on, recover lost data, and resume normal business operations.

Disaster Recovery Solutions

Modern businesses rely more than ever on technology to serve their customers. Even minor outages can result in significant downtime and impact customer and investor confidence. The IBM FlashSystem Cyber ​​Recovery Guarantee is designed for anyone purchasing a new FlashSystem array, managed by IBM Storage experts and powered by IBM Storage Insights Pro.

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