Élaborer une stratégie solide de Recovery après sinistre

Modern digital businesses need robust disaster recovery plans to bounce back from cyberattacks, natural disasters, or unforeseen events – and to provide their organizations with data protections, minimal financial loss, reputation preservation, and strong customer trust.

In such highly connected, digital environments, downtime can be exorbitantly expensive. Some reports estimate the average cost of downtime at $9,000 per minute for larger organizations and up to $5 million per hour for certain industries and specific scenarios. More than half (54%) of the respondents to the Uptime Institute data center survey reported that their most recent “significant, serious, or severe outage” cost more than $100,000, with 16% saying their most recent outage cost more than $1 million. And according to IDC’s Worldwide State of Data Protection & DR Survey, the most common consequence of data disruption is employee overtime, which affects 45% of organizations. Another 40% reported losing employee productivity due to incidents, and 35% incurred direct revenue loss as a result of outages – and 35% permanently lost data.

These and many other outcomes are simply unacceptable and put an imperative upon every business to build a robust disaster recovery strategy.

Most businesses have some form of a disaster recovery plan in place in the event of a disaster, whether it be a manmade cyberattack or a natural event such as a hurricane. But that doesn’t mean the plans they have can appropriately protect assets and restore operations in today’s digital world.

Compared to just 10 years ago, disaster recovery is more cloud-based with a focus on continuous business rather than just data recovery. With a greater emphasis on automation and faster recovery times, disaster recovery today must account for the widespread adoption of cloud infrastructure and increasingly complex IT systems. In the past, physical backups and secondary data centers played a larger role in disaster recovery, but today businesses rely heavily on cloud services for data storage, replication, and rapid recovery.

Here are the critical steps needed to create a disaster recovery plan to protect the business:

• Identify critical data: Take an inventory of your systems, applications, and data considered most critical to your business operations. Prioritize the assets by recovery times in case of a disaster.

• Establish RTO and RPO: Determine your acceptable recovery time objective (how quickly systems need to be restored) and recovery point objective (how much data loss is tolerable) based on impact to the business.

• Configure backup storage policies: Create a disaster recovery storage policy, which details how to store your backups separately. Policies also can include features such as write-once-read-many (WORM) protections to prevent accidental deletion.

• Establish replication: Continuously or periodically copy critical data to a secondary site, enabling rapid recovery in case of a primary site failure. Synchronize systems and data between the production and recovery sites to safeguard against data loss.

• Develop recovery procedures: Document detailed steps for restoring data and systems from your disaster recovery backups, including required hardware, network configurations, and application-specific restoration procedures.

• Assign roles and responsibilities: Identify the personnel within your IT team who will be responsible for maintaining, initiating, and managing the disaster recovery process. Whether it be a CIO, a disaster recovery team leader, a crisis coordinator, or a senior IT manager, the team leader is responsible for making strategic decisions and managing the overall recovery process. A disaster recovery team also typically includes members across IT domains such as IT, operations, continuous business, and risk management.

• Conduct regular testing: Plan periodic tests and drills of your disaster recovery plan by performing partial or full restores from your backups to verify data integrity and identify any issues that would detract from a speedy, accurate recovery.

• Update your disaster recovery plan: Regularly review the plan and update it as needed to adjust for any necessary changes.

Operating without a disaster recovery plan is not an option. By accounting for these steps, business leaders can rest a little easier in the face of inevitable cyberattacks or system failures.

Grâce à une stratégie formelle détaillant la marche à suivre en cas de sinistre, les entreprises bénéficieront de nombreux avantages, allant d’une réduction des temps d’arrêt et d’un environnement plus sécurisé à une meilleure conformité et à des opérations rationalisées.

L’un des principaux avantages est la réduction, voire la suppression, des temps d’arrêt. Un plan adapté permet aux activités critiques de se poursuivre avec une interruption minimale, voire nulle. Par ailleurs, les bonnes pratiques en matière de reprise après sinistre peuvent également aider les entreprises à réduire leurs coûts en évitant l’impact financier des temps d’arrêt ou d’un sinistre.

Un plan de reprise après sinistre s’accompagne naturellement d’une sécurité renforcée. Par exemple, une organisation peut consolider sa posture de sécurité et, au final, limiter l’impact des attaques et autres risques de sécurité. Une meilleure conformité et une réduction des pertes de données constituent également des avantages majeurs, car les entreprises définissent des mesures de protection pour les données et les charges de travail et minimisent le volume de données perdues lors d’un sinistre.

Disaster recovery promises many benefits – some expected and some that can be a happy surprise. For instance, the process of creating a disaster recovery plan often involves reviewing and updating existing IT infrastructure, leading to potential improvements in system performance and reliability during normal business operations. With streamlined IT operations, a disaster recovery plan can help identify unnecessary hardware and help reduce technical debt.

Le processus d’élaboration du plan aide également l’entreprise à identifier et à évaluer les risques et les vulnérabilités à l’échelle de l’organisation, ce qui peut conduire à un renforcement global de la sécurité. Tous ces avantages concourent à améliorer l’avantage concurrentiel global d’une entreprise, car les clients ont ainsi l’assurance que celle-ci est capable de fonctionner et de répondre à leurs besoins même en cas de sinistre.

Un plan de reprise après sinistre solide removes the panic that comes with an unexpected crisis, and it does so much more. It manages expectations and puts the right people in place to handle the disaster. It helps meet legal and regulatory compliance demands as well as maintaining a positive public perception of the business. With a solid plan in place, organizations not only minimize the impact of cyberattacks and other disruptions, but they also can assurer la continuité de leurs activités et réduire au minimum les craintes liées à la perte de données ou à la ruine financière.