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Disaster Recovery strategy

Definition
Methodology chosen by an organization to restore its critical operation and systems to
normal status following a disaster. It generally includes
(1) resorting to manual operations,
(2) suspending data processing to repair onsite systems,
(3) arrange a service provider for temporary data processing facilities, and
(4) backing-up essential data at an offsite facility.

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How to plan a disaster recovery strategy

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Every business needs to face the reality of disasters, no matter whether they result from forces of nature, acts
of terrorism, careless (or malicious) employee actions or simple hardware failure. Every business, no matter
what size, is now re-examining its IT preparedness for a disaster and disaster response plans.
Data loss can be devastating. Business records today are increasingly in electronic form. Dependency on
these records, and the tools used to process and store them, continues to grow. Most electronic records, such
as emails or transactions, never get printed out. If electronic records are lost, they might be impossible to recreate. For most businesses, data loss is not an option.
Businesses are also now obligated to comply with legal requirements for retention and discovery of
electronic information, even in the face of disaster. Consequently, organizations today must implement the
technologies and policies needed to ensure the safe preservation and availability of their data and guarantee
the timely recovery of that data when disaster strikes. Disaster recovery strategy starts with sound planning
and design.
Addressing current disaster recovery capabilities
Disaster recovery planning involves three musts.
1.

Your backups must be protected. For example, having a backup tape full of data in a local tape drive will not
be of much use if the data center burns to the ground. A second copy of your backup needs to be in a different
physical location.

2.

You must be able to recover your business operation from the backup. If one site washes away in a flood, there
must be enough data in a protected location to continue normal business operations. For most companies, data is
not the business -- data supports the business.

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3.

Your recovery process must function properly within a given timeframe prescribed by your specific business
needs. Simply put, a distant backup is worthless if you can't get the business running again -- or take weeks to
restore data from tape.

Once you weigh the implication of each of these musts against your business recovery requirements, you
can start to formulate a meaningful disaster recovery strategy.
Disaster recovery strategies and business needs
There is no single approach to disaster recovery (also called business continuity planning or BCP) and no
one way to protect your business operations. Strategies and procedures established by one company may be
inappropriate for another. Bu there are several common approaches to disaster recovery planning.
The most common approach to disaster recovery is offsite tape, where backups are periodically run in data
centers or remote offices. The backup tapes are then duplicated and transferred to a secure offsite location,
such as an Iron Mountain vaulting facility. The tapes are recalled based on a rotation schedule or when
recovery is needed. In recent years, optical media such as DVD has also been used for backups. Optical
media is more expensive than tape, but it offers better performance and reliability. However, optical media
has fallen out of favor in backup scenarios because of its limited capacity.
Another popular option is remote disk replication, where data center resources are periodically copied to
similar storage resources at a distant location. For instance, a bank might choose to replicate the contents of
EMC's Centera across a WAN link to a duplicate Centera installed at a location hundreds of miles away.
Duplicate resources like this can often allow faster recovery than tape and, when properly implemented,
might also take over as the main storage location if the primary site becomes unavailable.
There is always a cost element to disaster planning/recovery. It's a form of insurance: You're spending
money to protect against a greater financial loss. The goal is to match the complexity of the data protection
scheme and the associated cost with the potential loss you're trying to prevent. So while a small medical
office might do well shuffling weekly backup tapes offsite because its recovery needs may not justify more
expensive options, a global 24/7 Internet retailer might require a completely replicated data center because
downtime will cost far more than the disaster recovery solution.

Service Degradation Strategies

In analysis of disaster recovery alternatives it is necessary to identify as many candidates for a service
degradation strategy as possible. If a major disaster event occurs, the Disaster Management Team may have
available computer resources that amount to a fraction of that which we normally need to process all our
applications.
Service degradation strategies that should be considered are:
Reduction of Service or Normal Response: This strategy normally applies to lower priority batch
processing that could be accomplished on a time available basis at University or non-University
facilities. It is not applicable to interactive processes or when the batch processing is necessary to
support a high-priority function.

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Implementation of Manual Procedures: Almost all applications represent an electronic data processing
solution to what was previously a manual process. Reversion to the manual process should always be
considered because in some cases it may be the only solution available.
Withdrawal of Services: There are some functions where the obvious strategy may be to simply not
perform their