Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) is a set of policies, tools, and procedures designed to enable the recovery or continuation of IT infrastructure and systems following a disaster.

Disaster recovery focuses specifically on recovering IT systems and data after a major disruption. It's a subset of the broader business continuity plan, focusing on technology recovery.

Key DR concepts: - RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Target time to restore systems - RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Target amount of acceptable data loss - DR Site: Secondary location for recovery (hot, warm, or cold) - Failover: Switching to backup systems - Failback: Returning to primary systems after recovery

DR site types: - Hot Site: Fully operational duplicate, instant failover - Warm Site: Partially equipped, needs some setup - Cold Site: Basic facilities, requires significant setup time - Cloud DR: Using cloud services for recovery

Modern DR strategies: - Cloud-based disaster recovery (DRaaS) - Multi-region cloud deployments - Automated failover and health checks - Regular backup testing and verification

Why It Matters

Without a tested disaster recovery plan, organizations face extended outages that can cost $5,600 per minute on average. Cloud outages, ransomware attacks, and infrastructure failures are not hypothetical—they happen regularly. DR plans with defined RTOs, tested failover procedures, and verified backups are the difference between a brief disruption and a business-ending event.

Key Points

Focuses on IT system and data recovery

RTO and RPO drive DR strategy and costs

Must be tested at least annually

Cloud-based DR has become the standard

Backups alone are not a DR plan

Applicable Compliance Frameworks

SOC 2 ISO 27001 HIPAA PCI DSS

Related Terms

Business Continuity

Business continuity planning (BCP) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company, ensuring critical functions can continue during and after a disaster.

Backup Strategy

A backup strategy defines how an organization protects data through regular copies, including what to back up, how often, where to store backups, and how to verify they can be restored.

Incident Response

Incident response is a structured approach to preparing for, detecting, containing, and recovering from security incidents while minimizing damage.