Thursday, 9 April 2015 Blog ehdf

Disaster Recovery: Navigating the Basic Terminology

With the increasing rate of cyber threats, disaster recovery is now a more crucial part of enterprise computing than ever before. Data is crucial for all organisations, hence technology users are realizing the need for disaster recovery and back-up solutions. To help you get a firm grasp on the subject, we list below some related industry terms that will help you navigate the basic terminology of disaster recovery. Some of these are not exclusive to IT disaster recovery, but overall risk mitigation and business continuity.

1. Business Impact Analysis

Business impact analysis (BIA) is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency.

2. Business Continuity Plan

The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is an essential part of any organisation’s response planning. It sets out how the business will operate following an incident and how it expects to return to ‘business as usual’ in the quickest possible time afterwards.

3. Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster recovery is a subset of overall business continuity. It is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organisation after a natural or human-induced disaster.

4. Recovery Point Objective

According to Techopedia, recovery point objective (RPO) is “the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time”. This RPO is very different from the RTO. The RPO enables IT managers and administrators to strategically decide the best disaster recovery options.

5. Recovery Time Objective

Recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum desired duration between a business interruption and the continuance of normal business operations. In other words, the RTO refers to the point in time after which downtime is no longer acceptable.

6. Hot, Cold and Warm Sites

Organizations relocate to backup sites after a disaster to implement efficient and secure business continuity. DR sites are of three different types:

• Cold sites have virtualized or scaled down hardware enough to keep the business operations active during a disaster. Cold sites have backups that may be between several days and a week old and the data is restored and tested at regular intervals.

• Warm sites have hardware and connectivity already established, though on a smaller scale than the original production site.

• Hot sites are essentially mirrors of your data centre infrastructure. The backup site is populated with servers, cooling, power, and office space (if applicable).

7. Business Continuity Seats

These are fully equipped and business ready seats, allowing complete staff relocation for any business when workplace continuity is crucial at the time of a disaster.