Three Key Aspects of Disaster Recovery Planning

Of course, you can’t have a disaster recovery process in place without proper disaster recovery planning. By outlining the plan beforehand and making sure you have the right tools in place, you can develop a recovery plan that can protect your data, your business, and your customers in the event of a disaster, such as a cloud outage or a cyber attack like ransomware.

What Should We Include in Our Disaster Recovery Planning?

Cloud Backup

Disaster recovery starts with carefully identifying how you will back up your business’s data, applications, and workloads so they can be recovered and restored when needed.

Cloud backup-as-a-service provides automatic backups, unlimited scalability, routinely updated security, and doesn’t require new software or hardware—making this solution the most effective and streamlined method to create and store backups for recovery.

Not all cloud backup solutions are equal. Make sure that your disaster recovering planning utilizes a cloud backup solution that offers the following:

• Backups stored outside of the user’s account
• Granular recovery
• Rapid, flexible recovery

Recovery Time Objective

In addition to the ability to back up and restore application data, disaster recovery planning also involves establishing certain metrics. The first of these is the recovery time objective or RTO. This is defined as the amount of time that an organization has deemed acceptable to recover from a disaster, usually aiming for that recovery to occur before the downtime creates significant consequences.

For example, let’s say an organization has identified an RTO of four hours and later experiences an outage that disables its infrastructure. In this scenario, the organization must have its applications back up and running within four hours, or the downtime will cause a severe break in business continuity.

Recovery Point Objective

The second key metric in a disaster recovery plan is the recovery point objective or RPO. This is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss during a disaster event or outage before the amount of data lost exceeds the maximum threshold allotted within a business continuity plan. Put simply, this is the acceptable amount of data that can be lost before internal operations and end users are affected, but expressed as an amount of time.

For example, suppose an organization automatically backs up its data via cloud backup every five hours and later experiences an outage that lasts for three hours. The duration of the outage did not exceed the last data backup point, thus the organization has adhered to its RPO since it can recover enough data to resume operations without major disruptions or critical data loss.

Simplify Disaster Recovery Planning with Clumio

An enterprise’s disaster recovery capabilities are only as good as the tools it uses. Clumio’s industry-leading cloud backup-as-a-service platform provides swift and efficient disaster recovery via innovative rapid restore capabilities that maintain and support business continuity in the face of a disaster event — all while meeting RTOs and RPOs. These features include:

• Rapid backups of AWS data from any region across your entire organization
• Air-gapped backups stored outside of the primary account and region, providing secure protection from ransomware and other cyber attacks
• Granular and flexible data restore for faster recovery