Disaster Recovery Planning Organizations Disaster
I’ve provided 3 discussions below that need to be responded separately. This week’s discussion is ‘Disaster Recovery in IT’.
1-)Disaster recovery planning plays an important role in organizations since it helps in protecting data and ensures success to the company with continuous accurate IT processes. It also helps in providing proper infrastructure whenever an organization faces an unfortunate IT disaster. Below are the three important concepts regarding disaster recovery planning which I have learnt from the video.
The significance and need for disaster recovery planning
Organizations must require disaster recovery plan since implementing this plan would help them in retrieving lost data in IT disaster event. It also helps in securing important data of organization and its IT infrastructure whenever disaster event occurs (O’Day, 2014). Therefore, it is necessary to implement disaster recovery plan which would help in restoring IT processes and crucial information of an organization after IT disaster. We need disaster recovery planning since this process requires number of security measures and accurate approaches in order to retrieve the data (O’Day, 2014)
Comparison between the modern DRP and traditional DRP processes
In this video we can see the major different points between usage of traditional DRP methods and present modern DRP methods. According to O’Day (2014), the present disaster recovery planning methods are more effective when compared to traditional disaster recovery planning methods. Because in video we can observe that traditional DRP methods have few limitations which causes DRP ineffective (less effective). This helped modern DRP methods in taking preventive measures and coming up with more effective modern DRP processes in present world (O’Day, 2014). We can also observe that some of the traditional DRP methods like frugal, warm and cold sites were also regarded as costlier when compared to modern DRP methods.
Cloud disaster recovery strategies
In present generation cost of infrastructure which is needed for modern DRP methods has been decreased (made less costly) with the help of cloud disaster recovery planning strategies (O’Day, 2014). The cloud disaster recovery approaches are working as a replacement for the traditional DRP methods in present IT world. They have various advantages like flexibility, scalability, and it also involves less infrastructure in present DRP method there by reducing the cost of the process. This proves that the cloud DRP strategies are cheaper and it also increases reliability by saving time and money (O’Day, 2014).
2-)IT Disaster and Recovery:
In the recent time, IT is evolving a lot, so businesses are more reliant on the technology. Obviously, challenge many organizations do face to keep IT infrastructures safe from the disaster’s loss. IT disasters occur due to mainly three reasons, one is natural disasters which are occurs due to flood, storms, earthquake etc. The second is due human errors like software update, wrong IT activities etc. The third is due to hardware or software unexpected failures. 47% of incidents occur due to human errors, 29% of incidents occur due to server failures and 24% of incidents occur due to natural disasters. (Pat, 2014).
To continue the business, it is important to have disaster recovery plan which can keep IT data recoverable in the disaster’s situations. As per the survey, in organizations 60% of disaster recovery plan works and 40% doesn’t work. In addition, 23% don’t test their disaster recovery plan and 65% don’t pass their DR tests. (Pat, 2014).
DR Traditional Methods:
There are four traditional methods which are discussed as follow:
Cold Site: In this method, primary data center backup is taken on infrequent basis in another datacenter in the same location. This is less expensive, but recovery operations are not effective and efficient. It may not recover complete data since it is not in sync with primary data center. This method is useful if application is small and doesn’t work on very critical business data. (Pat, 2014).
Frugal warm site: In this disaster recovery method, contains servers which are ready for the installation of production environments. This recovery method is better than cold site, but not efficient as hot site since it doesn’t take real time backup from primary data centers. (Pat, 2014).
Local hot site: In local hot site, recovery data center as replica server is always in sync with the primary data center, but both the data center servers present in the same building or in the same campus. This recovery method is good compare to the cold site and warm site due to real data backup and ready to replace primary data center in the real time in case of disaster. But, if any natural disaster occurs then, this method won’t work as recovery option since both the data center servers are present in the same location or campus. (Pat, 2014).
Hot site (Expensive): In this method, recovery data center as replica server is always in sync with primary data center, and both the data center servers are in the different locations. This is best method of disaster recovery since it handles all disaster situations like human errors, server failures and natural disasters. But this is expensive since it requires duplicate data center infrastructure in a different location, which adds additional setup and maintenance cost. (Pat, 2014).
DR Modern Method:
As discussed above, having hot site is the best disaster recovery option but it is expensive due to duplicate data center infrastructure. As many organizations work at a single location, so to have backup IT infrastructure in the different location become more expensive option for them. However, any organization has multiple offices in the different locations, just to have duplicate IT infrastructure for backup purpose is expensive option.
Solution to the above problem is provided in the disaster recover modern method. In the modern disaster recovery method, disaster recovery is handled by cloud disaster recovery solution. Recovery as a Solution is type of cloud-based disaster recovery. In this solution, few IT companies work as expert solution provider for data recovery management. It provides generic solution for the disaster recovery considering almost all combinations of disaster recovery problems for all kind of businesses. (Pat, 2014).
RaaS method used based on the subscription basis where organization buys subscription for disaster recovery operations and the organization pays as they use this service. In this case, disaster recovery solution provided as in form of hot site, but the IT infrastructure is available over to the vendor environment and it is accessible by VPN or private network. (Pat, 2014).
This is less expensive, effective and efficient compare to the traditional hot site method due to cloud-based solutions used in the modern method.
3-)Traditional Approach – Cold Site:
As a number of businesses become dependant on IT, it is very important to keep the IT services up and running. In the past, businesses did not rely on IT as much as today. The traditional approach for disaster recovery named cold site focuses on backing up the data to a remote location. This location will receive an unplanned back up of data in an inconsistent manner. As a result recovery of data from the cold site is very difficult.
Traditional Approach-Local Hot Site:
In this approach, the data is backed up to a proxy location located near to the office location. The back up is consistent and frequent. The budget allocated to maintain the local hot site is almost similar to the budget required to maintain the main office data server. The advantage of this approach is that the data back up is very frequent and in case of any disaster, immediate recovery can be performed. However, in case of a natural calamity like earthquake, both the office location and the local hot site will be affected and recovery will be delayed. Moving the local hot site to a remote location is very expensive and requires a significant amount of networking and talent in order to maintain this data center. If the data which is backed up is not part of the core business or revenue of the company does not support the expenses involved in the remote hot site, this approach might not be feasible.
Cloud for Data Recovery
Using Cloud services to maintain a back up of datacenter is one of the latest approaches for a data recovery plan. In this approach, all the data from the data center is stored in the cloud by accessing it using a VPN or a secure private network. When there is a disaster, the recovery plan will be automatically activated and the data and applications stored in the cloud will be retrieved and used to keep the services running. In this approach, the downtime would be less than 1 min in the event of a disaster.