Companies in which data is one of their business values, sooner or later, may face the problems of losing accumulated data. Chances are, it will take a long time for small and midsize businesses that rely heavily on their data to get back online or never even recover from a disaster. Thus, preventing data loss by planning for the worst-case scenario and preparing for the event will help you with disaster recovery.

What is disaster recovery

The simple explanation is that disaster recovery is the action that a business must take immediately after a severe data loss impacts operations. It includes a set of policies, tools, and procedures designed to enable a business to recover and resume the operation of vital technologies, infrastructure, and systems after a disaster.

The causes of data loss can be natural, such as floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, or man-made, such as infrastructure failures, terrorism, and critical errors or cyberattacks. While natural disasters cannot be prevented, risk management by avoiding disaster-prone situations and well-planned preparation can mitigate the impact. In the event of man-made disasters, preventive measures such as monitoring, testing, and mitigation planning are invaluable. However, regardless of the reason for data loss, disaster recovery will be required.

Planning ahead

Disaster recovery planning requires a good understanding of your overall business structure. Some of the factors you need to consider include the size of the company, management systems, regulatory framework, technology used, and more.

Disaster recovery control measures generally fall into three categories:

• Preventive measures to prevent the occurrence of an event.
• Detective measures, actions designed to detect unwanted events.
• Corrective actions, which include the steps required to fix or restore vulnerable systems.

Most of the volume and cost of disaster recovery will depend on your business processes.

Disaster recovery planning should include at least the following procedures:

• Analyzing the potential impact on your business
• Identifying vulnerabilities through risk assessment
• Deciding on immediate action depending on the vulnerability
• Making plans for interim actions
• Development of long-term action plans.

Experts from Tenendo, drawing on their own experience and on the experience of other customers, will help you:

• Create a system disaster recovery strategy
• Plan and help implement a disaster recovery strategy
• Test the created strategy
• Set up data replication between different zones in the clouds or even between different cloud service providers
• Configure monitoring and obtaining the necessary metrics.

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