To promote data resilience, organizations need to develop disaster recovery strategies that enable them to bounce back quickly after a traumatic incident. When companies think of disaster recovery, they typically see it as a solution for addressing the negative impact of natural disasters, such as wildfires, floods, or blizzards. Organizations make plans to back up and recover data when their systems are shut down by a traumatic event or equipment failure.
However, disaster recovery has become more about cybersecurity as companies are increasingly targeted by advanced attacks, such as ransomware. Disaster recovery can provide immutable copies of critical data so your company can recover without paying a ransom.
Companies need disaster recovery to prevent cyberattacks from interrupting operations after attempts to steal, compromise, and expose data.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery enables companies to maintain business continuity after an unplanned incident that threatens IT infrastructure and data. Traumatic incidents could include equipment failure, power outages, natural disasters, and cyberattacks. Cyberattacks count as disasters because they can cause catastrophic system failures and data loss. For example, after a ransomware attack, company systems are locked and all data has been encrypted, bringing operations to a halt. If companies lack a disaster recovery plan, they may be forced to pay a ransom to regain access to their data.
Disaster recovery enables companies to resume production and restore data completely. With disaster recovery, an organization should be able to achieve recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for restoring data to its latest state as quickly as possible.
To achieve disaster recovery, companies need to use backups to create a valid copy of data to recover from. Backups should be created regularly to ensure that the data used for recovery is current, complete, and accurate. Replicated copies of data can also be affected by cyberattacks, so a backup copy that is stored separately is important to a disaster recovery scenario.
Disaster recovery can use failover to move operations to a secondary system when the primary system fails. Ideally, failovers will occur seamlessly to keep users and customers from being aware of a problem.
Why is Disaster Recovery Important?
Disaster recovery is important because any outage or cyberattacks may lead to lengthy periods of downtime that your business can’t afford. An unplanned interruption to business operations can be costly because it brings production to a standstill. The longer the downtime continues, the more costly it becomes.
Downtime damages your company’s reputation by causing customers to think of you as unreliable. For highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, a long recovery time may lead to fines for non-compliance.
Without a validated disaster recovery plan, restoring your data and systems can be more expensive and time consuming. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2024 found that data breaches cost businesses an average of $4.88 million, a 10% increase from the previous year.
How to Accelerate Disaster Recovery
Even when companies have disaster recovery measures in place, they aren’t always following best practices. The key to successful disaster recovery is restoring data and operations quickly yet seamlessly. In order to know that your process works, we encourage customers to test their plan annually for validation.
To develop an effective approach to disaster recovery, companies need to understand how long they can afford to go without operating. How will your company operate while waiting for recovery? Where your data is being backed up and which media is being used has a significant impact on the success of your disaster recovery.
At ProActive Solutions, when we have conversations with our customers, we ask them how they are backing up their data. We discuss their methods, and if applicable, we can offer a solution to ensure their backup methods are in line with their plan for both recovery and continuity.
For successful disaster recovery, organizations need to have a mechanism for restoring data and operations that work regardless of which platform or hardware they use. In our experience, hardware compatibility accelerates recovery.
Rethinking Disaster Recovery
As the focus of disaster recovery shifts to cybersecurity, your company should take time to evaluate your approach to data resiliency. Assessing your current disaster recovery plan and how long it takes to restore data and operations may lead you to revise not only your strategy, but the technology that supports it.
The ProActive team has a breadth of knowledge around data resiliency and business continuity options with the IBM Power platform. There are a variety of solutions, both from a hardware and software approach, that are available to provide your organization with attainable disaster recovery and business continuity.
Explore how IBM Power can help your company use disaster recovery to strengthen your approach to cybersecurity. Ask for a consultation from ProActive.
COMING SOON: Read Part 2 of our IBM Power for Data Resilience series to find out how to create a disaster recovery plan.
