Disaster Recovery Overview

Disaster recovery is defined as the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster.

Lumenate takes a pragmatic approach to Disaster Recovery by working with the business stakeholders and technical teams to determine what is both desirable and achievable.

Disaster Recovery Concepts

• Determine the current level of disaster preparedness
Before you can know where you're going, you have to know where you are. While it is possible to perform a "top-down" implementation of a disaster recovery plan, a higher-yield approach is to begin by bridging gaps in the current infrastructure and then layer additional protection for disasters on top.  Likewise, knowing the current environment allows you to leverage existing assets, such as an existing alternate site or already purchased assets that can be used to provide a Disaster Recovery solution.

• Establish the RTO and RPO
RTO is the Recovery Time Objective. Put simply, it is the amount of time between when a disaster is declared and business resumes.

RPO is the Recovery Point Objective.  Put simply, it is the amount of data that can be lost in a disaster.

Although they are related, and drive the technical demands of any Disaster Recovery solution, they are not necessarily coupled.  A small RPO typically drives the demand for large communication links between sites to support synchronous replication, while a small RTO typically drives the demand for standby sites where equipment is already staged and ready to perform processing.

As RTO and RPO decrease the overall solution cost increases.

• Gather low-hanging fruit
It is often possible for a company to significantly improve its disaster preparedness through simple steps, such as improving backup/recovery procedures, implementing local site clustering, or even such simple steps as mirroring the OS drives in all servers.