IT Disaster Recovery Services

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is the term used to describe the plan for returning business operations to normal after a disaster. If daily business operations have been interrupted, your Disaster Recovery Plan will transition your continuity measures back to normal processes.

However, just 30% of businesses have an official Disaster Recovery Plan. One of the primary reasons for this is that too many assumptions are made. Many people confuse having a backup strategy with having a DRP. Sadly, this confusion contributes to 70% of small businesses ceasing within a year of a major data breach.

Do you know how long it would take your existing backup solution to restore all your data? How long could your business survive? These are answers you would confidently know if you had a Disaster Recovery Plan.

It’s much easier to consider the risks if you think of backup as a copy of your data and the Disaster Recovery Plan as the insurance that enables its recovery. At a minimum, your DRP should provide detailed answers to the following questions:
- Who should be involved in the planning?
- How will your business recover from infrastructure failure or data loss?
- Who will be responsible for recovery tasks?
- How frequently should we stress-test our DRP?
- Who will run the stress-tests?

An effective DRP is seldom handled purely in-house since it is a very specialist area of IT. That’s why partnering with specialist consultants like ourselves will give you absolute peace of mind.

A Business Continuity Strategy must consider all possible eventualities that pose a risk to your business. Nobody saw the COVID-19 pandemic happening, but those who already had a business continuity strategy found the pivot to remote working easier.

Large global incidents aside, though, you need to ask yourself a series of questions when preparing a business continuity strategy. The list of scenarios could be anything from a flood through to your reliance on third-party suppliers and cyber-attacks.

It’s important to create a plan that is bespoke to your business. Here are some common things every business continuity strategy should plan for:
- Temporary change of premises
- Remote working for home (and now hybrid working)
- Data backups
- Reallocation of roles to staff
- Use of third-party contractors or suppliers as a fallback
- Ability to safeguard and restore personal data (to meet GDPR)

It is easy to get business IT business continuity and IT disaster recovery solutions confused. For a start, they go hand-in-hand. Companies use both to prepare for a wide range of natural and human-made disasters.

However, they are not the same thing, and it’s very important not to confuse them.

It’s easierto think of an IT business continuity plan as a temporary solution to keep your business running and an IT disaster recovery solution as a way of returning everything to normal after the event.

The purpose of an IT Disaster Recovery Strategy is to resolve the disruption. At a simple level, it involves identifying the cause of the business-critical problem and finding a way to return business operations to normal. It can, however, involve very complex technical solutions against a tight deadline. After all, every minute of downtime is a cost to a business.

A Disaster Recovery Plan will often include Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) – these are time estimates to restore a product, service, or function to normal working order following an incident.

Take a fire, for example. A business should prepare for its servers being damaged (possibly beyond repair) and that its systems will need to be restored from a recent backup. The RTO details how long it would take to restore everything to enable people to work.

To restore a business to normal after an incident, many companies are now turning to DRaaS. This stands for Disaster Recovery as a Service. Essentially, it’s a category of Cloud computing that protects applications and data from a disaster or service disruption at one location by enabling a full recovery in the cloud. This means that your business can operate virtually, in a secure cloud location while your primary systems are restored.

At Agile Technical Solutions, we have our own DRaaS replication service. This involves replicating either your physical or virtual servers into our local data centre in Colchester, Essex. It’s a fraction of the cost of traditional IT disaster recovery solutions and DR systems.

There are many benefits to having an IT Disaster Recovery Plan. In the event of a business-critical incident, you can expect to realise the following from having an effective IT disaster recovery strategy:
- Massively reduce your restoration time (the time it takes for you to operate as normal again)
- Limit financial fallout. Faster recovery and restoration time mean less business lost.
- Minimise disruption to business-critical processes. Your IT disaster recovery strategy should identify the most important business-critical functions and look to restore these as a priority.
- Limit reputational damage. How a business deals with an incident reflects on its brand. The sooner you can recover, the better you will be perceived by customers.
- Ongoing Disaster Recovery (DR) suitable to your business, provided you regularly stress-test your disaster recovery solution (ideally at least yearly).