Business Disaster Recovery Use Cases: How to Prepare Your Business to Face Real-World Threats

Successful business owners know how important it is to have a plan in case an unexpected event disrupts normal operations. Modern businesses face many types of disasters, including pandemics, cyberattacks, large-scale power outages, and natural disasters. Last year, businesses around the world spent approximately $219 billion on cybersecurity and security solutions, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). This is a 12% increase over the previous year (link resides outside ibm.com).

Leaders know they need to be prepared, but the number of solutions and scenarios to consider can be overwhelming. In this article, we’ll look at some common threats and how disaster recovery plans (DRPs) and solutions can optimize preparedness.

Let’s start with some commonly used terms.

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Disaster recovery (DR) refers to a company’s ability to recover from unexpected events that impact normal business operations. A strong DR plan helps businesses protect sensitive data and restore normal processes in days, hours, or even minutes.
• Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP): A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a document that clearly outlines how a business will recover from an unexpected event. DRP, along with Business Continuity Planning (BCP), helps businesses prepare for a variety of scenarios such as natural disasters, widespread power outages, ransomware attacks, and malware attacks.
• Failover/Failback: Failover is a widely used tactic in businesses to move critical data or functionality to a secondary system when an unexpected event causes the primary system to fail. Failover is the process of switching operations back to the original system after the threat has been mitigated. Failover and failback both use data replication and are widely used in DR strategies for data centers and telecommunications networks.
• Virtualization Recovery Plan (VRP): Virtualized recovery plans are on-demand Software as a Service (SaaS) that use virtual machine (VM) instances that are ready to operate within minutes of an outage. Virtual machines (VMs) and their accompanying apps are representations or emulations of physical computers that provide system capacity to run workloads continuously without failure or provide critical application recovery through high availability (HA).
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RTO and RPO refer to the time it takes to restore business operations after an unexpected incident and the amount of data a business can recover if lost during an attack. Setting RTO and RPO is an important step in the recovery process. Some companies perform continuous data backups to remote data centers to ensure data integrity in the event of a large-scale breach, allowing for a zero RPO. Others set an acceptable RPO at minutes (or hours) because they are confident that they can recover everything lost in a short period of time.

Benefits of Business Disaster Recovery

Disasters can cause all kinds of problems for businesses. From floods that block access to critical physical assets to cyberattacks that compromise data protection or IT infrastructure, a disaster recovery plan helps ensure business continuity regardless of the threat. The most common benefits for businesses investing in disaster recovery solutions include:

• Business continuity: Business continuity and business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) ensures that an organization can return to normal operations after an unplanned event occurs. Having a business continuity strategy in place will help you restore critical off-premises and on-premises business functions and restore the trust of stakeholders, customers, and investors after an unexpected event.
• cut down the money: According to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach last year was $4.45 million, a 15% increase over the past three years. Companies without a DR plan are taking unnecessary risks. This is because the costs and penalties of a successful attack can be far greater than the savings from not investing in an attack.
• Reduce downtime: Today’s top performing companies often rely on complex technologies for their most critical business operations. An unplanned incident can cost a company millions of dollars if it disrupts critical technologies such as communications networks or infrastructure. Additionally, the high-profile nature of outages caused by many cyberattacks or human errors and the frequently analyzed lengths of network downtime often cause customers and investors to flee.
• Improved compliance features: Many successful companies operate in highly regulated fields such as healthcare and personal finance. These sectors impose heavy fines and penalties for data breaches, given the sensitive and personal nature of the data at risk. Business disaster recovery solutions help shorten the response and recovery lifecycle of businesses facing unexpected incidents. This is critical in sectors where financial penalties are determined by the duration and severity of the breach.

How Business Disaster Recovery Works

A business disaster recovery strategy plays an important role when an unplanned event causes disruption to your organization. Below is a popular five-step process to help organizations prepare for a variety of threats.

1. Perform business impact analysis: Start by assessing each threat your company may face and its potential impact on business operations. Consider how each potential threat could impact your critical services, resulting in lost revenue, downtime, or reputational damage.
2. Risk analysis: Now that you have a list of risks facing your company, you can try to gauge the likelihood of each risk. Risk analysis is the process of ranking each risk according to its potential impact and likelihood and then prioritizing them accordingly.
3. Create an asset inventory: An asset inventory helps you identify hardware, software, IT infrastructure, and everything else needed to perform your functions. After identifying all your assets, group them into three categories.important, important and Not important:
   • critical: These are assets necessary for normal business operations.
   • important: An asset that is used more than once a day and whose interruption would impact, but would not completely disrupt, business operations.
   • Not important: An asset that a business uses infrequently but is not essential to its normal operations.
4. Establish roles and responsibilities. Clearly outline responsibilities so team members know what is expected of them in the event of a disaster. Examples of commonly assigned roles include an incident reporter, who is responsible for communicating with stakeholders throughout a disaster, an asset manager, who is responsible for ensuring the safety of assets during an incident, and a DRP supervisor, who manages team members and ensures that tasks are performed. I was assigned.
5. Practice and improve: Business disaster recovery requires continuous practice and improvement to be effective. Update your plan regularly based on your team’s performance. Always keep an eye on how your organization changes over time and add any new assets you acquire after forming your DRP to ensure future protection.

Business Disaster Recovery Use Cases

There are different plans to consider depending on your company’s size, industry, and disaster recovery priorities. After performing a business impact analysis (BIA) and risk analysis (RA), a company may decide that it needs to have different DR plans in place for different assets such as warehouses, data centers, critical equipment, etc.

Regardless of what needs to be protected, the overall goal of a good DRP is to restore normal business processes as quickly and safely as possible. Below are five business disaster recovery use cases to help you better understand the importance of choosing the right solution and having a strong plan.

Natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, fires, etc.)

Natural disasters such as floods, fires, and earthquakes can threaten people and valuable buildings, equipment, and software. Imagine arriving at work to discover that a hurricane in another part of the world has devastated the warehouse storing your most valuable equipment. According to Forbes, 40% of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) (link resides outside ibm.com) never reopen after a natural disaster. A strong Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) helps businesses face a variety of natural disasters and keep their most critical infrastructure, including employees, safe.

One method that is becoming increasingly popular for natural disaster recovery planning is geographic overlap. This method of moving critical company assets offsite and distributing them across multiple locations helps reduce the likelihood that the same unplanned event will impact multiple locations.

cyber attack

Due to their high-profile and costly nature, cyberattacks are one of the most destructive and costly types of disruption a business can face. To recover from cyberattacks, businesses often turn to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) providers. Companies that take a DRaaS approach to DRP creation are essentially outsourcing the DRP to a service provider. DRaaS providers host and manage the infrastructure needed for recovery, then create and manage response plans and ensure business-critical operations can resume quickly after an attack.

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 2023. DRaaS providers are faced with a wide range of challenges resulting from cyberattacks, including helping businesses restore access to affected systems, reduce downtime, restore investor confidence, and ensure compliance in highly regulated sectors.

Cloud or local server outage

To mitigate the damage caused by a cloud provider or local server provider outage, many companies use a failover/failback process. In the event of an outage in the cloud, multicloud, or local server, systems running failover/failback as part of DRP will immediately transition to the backup environment. In these environments, business operations can continue to run cloud services indefinitely. In some cases, users may not even be aware that they are not using a typical cloud computing environment. Once the primary server is back up and running, tasks switch back and the secondary server is turned off. This seamless transfer helps prevent data loss and keeps valuable services online during periods of disruption.

Network connection failure

Network outages along with cyberattacks can cost millions of dollars in downtime and create news cycles that are detrimental to businesses. Having a sound network recovery plan in place can help your business recover from a variety of severe disruptions, including Internet access, cellular communications, local area networks (LANs), and wide area networks (WANs).

With so many companies relying on network services for core business operations, network recovery plans and solutions must clearly document the procedures and responsibilities required to restore service. Like cyberattack DRPs, network failure DRPs are increasingly being outsourced to DRaaS providers with specialized resources and expertise.

data center crash

If your data center goes down, your business can experience all kinds of problems. Common threats to data storage include power outages, overcrowding that can lead to human error, and difficulty meeting compliance requirements. A data center disaster recovery plan focuses on the security of your facility and the ability of your staff to get back up and running after an unexpected incident.

Data center DRP assesses risk and analyzes key components such as physical environment, connectivity, power, and security. Because data centers face a wide range of potential threats, DRPs tend to have a broader scope than others.

Protect yourself with business disaster recovery solutions

In today’s fast-paced, competitive business environment, even minor downtime can be a game-changer for your business. The demand for scalable, high-performing, and affordable backup and recovery solutions has never been greater. Veeam on IBM Cloud provides predictable backup and fast recovery for your entire hybrid cloud, making it easier to move on-premises workloads and backups to the cloud for disaster recovery.

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