What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?  

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a crucial set of codified procedures and processes that outline an organization's response to the loss of critical IT and infrastructure functions due to a disaster or incident. In the IT space, the DSP focuses on cyberattack mitigation and necessary hardware and software failures at the infrastructure level.    

A disaster recovery plan aims to restore IT and infrastructure operations and ensure business continuity as quickly as possible. In the modern cloud-first environment many businesses operate in, having a solid DRP with a robust data recovery workflow is critical for maintaining business resilience.     

What are the essential components of an effective disaster recovery plan?  

Before you develop a disaster recovery plan, it's crucial to assess risks and perform a business impact analysis (BIA) to understand how disasters and accidents impact various business functions. This analysis can also help you prioritize which parts of your infrastructure to prioritize during recovery; not all data are equally important.  

Some of the essential components of a robust DRP include, but are not limited to:   

• Responsibilities and Roles: defining teams and specific personnel, as well as their roles in the disaster recovery efforts to ensure a coordinated response  
• Resources Inventory: compiling a list of software and hardware components, as well as data critical to the business (elements that should be continuously available) and logistics of their recovery, including data centers, recovery sites (hot, warm, cold), and backup storage locations; this list is further expanded if a business relies on offline operations and processes many documents, which have to be copied/ backed up for operational and compliance needs;   
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): specifies the maximum amount of data that can be lost after an incident or because of a disaster. It's usually measured in units of time (6 hours of data, 10 hours of data, or more). RPO helps determine the frequency and granularity of data backups.  
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): specifies the maximum amount of time allowed until critical infrastructure is recovered before it starts impacting business continuity; RTO defines the timeline within which restoration efforts must be completed to minimize downtime.  
• DRP Procedures: a detailed and prescriptive list of steps necessary to perform within the critical initial period after the disaster or an accident to ensure streamlined disaster recovery. These procedures also often include an internal and external communication plan that allows the organization to inform all relevant parties (customers, partners, or employees) and minimize the impact on the business;  
• DRP Testing: procedures and processes involved in testing the existing disaster recovery plan and all its components to ensure their effectiveness. This testing is essential to identify gaps or weaknesses in the plan and make necessary improvements.  

How often should a disaster recovery plan be tested and updated?  

Disaster recovery tests or drills are essential to any disaster recovery effort. They play a vital role in determining the adequacy of the existing Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in meeting your business needs and RPO/ RTO expectations. Moreover, these tests can help businesses identify gaps and amend existing DRP requirements.     

For smaller organizations, it's recommended to perform disaster recovery testing at least once a year. However, larger entities with hundreds or thousands of employees may need to increase the frequency to once a quarter. The testing frequency should be based on the complexity of the business and infrastructure. Many organizations may opt to perform even more frequent testing. Arcserve offers our customers a free yearly annual review of the backup infrastructure. This review will be performed by a technical expert who will provide a report on the status of the infrastructure at the end of the review.  

It's a common practice to update the DRP after each test. This is because the tests often reveal bugs, procedural inconsistencies, non-secure network configurations, and other issues that must be addressed. Additionally, any major infrastructure change should also be accompanied by a DRP update and its subsequent test to ensure its effectiveness.  

What are the differences between a disaster recovery plan (DRP) and a business continuity plan (BCP)?  

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) and a business continuity plan (BCP) are different but interconnected concepts. Their main differences lie in their scope and focus.  

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is focused on the infrastructure and IT procedures and processes. It is designed to restore operations and functionality of servers and IT systems in the event of a disaster, such as an act of God or a cyberattack. The DRP aims to minimize downtime and ensure the timely recovery of critical systems and data.   

On the other hand, a business continuity plan (BCP) is a more holistic concept encompassing various aspects of the business beyond IT, including supply chains, staffing, and other critical business functions. Both are focused on ensuring continued operations and business resilience, but are nevertheless, distinct.   

For example, if an office building gets hit by an earthquake, the DRP would be responsible for restoring operations for any servers and IT systems in that office. Meanwhile, the BCP would include a broader plan with remote work arrangements for employees from that office, including the logistics of supplying them with everything they might need to perform their duties.   

What are organizations' most common challenges when creating a disaster recovery plan?  

Disaster recovery planning is a multi-layered and complex process that must consider many factors. From this perspective, some of the major challenges in this process include inventory transparency (visibility into all essential infrastructure components), data resilience (availability and completeness of backups), resource availability (employees, budget, and time), and infrastructure complexity.   

Too often, IT infrastructure is a "layered cake" of tools, integrations, and capabilities that all have their dependencies and functions. The more complex this set up is, the harder it is to create a robust DRP. Reducing IT complexity can significantly improve an organization's ability to develop and execute a disaster recovery plan.   

How can organizations assess the effectiveness of their disaster recovery plan?  

By conducting continuous disaster recovery testing and drills. When an organization gauges performance against important recovery indicators, such as RPO and RTO, these tests must be regular, rigorous, and KPI-driven.  

By analyzing the performance and identifying areas for improvement. After each DRP test, the team must analyze the performance against the targets, identifying areas for improvement and swiftly introducing them into the DRP to enhance its effectiveness.    

On top of testing, organizations must continuously review the existing plan to ensure it's still relevant in the context of existing infrastructure and compliance requirements. For example, major infrastructure overhauls should trigger a DRP review cycle that can happen in parallel.    

IT and infrastructure teams should establish communication channels that allow employees to report potential bottlenecks and issues that may jeopardize disaster recovery efforts. This communication cycle can also include internal training and disaster recovery enablement for relevant organizational stakeholders.   

By following these essential steps, organizations can competently assess the effectiveness of their disaster recovery plans and make necessary improvements to enhance their readiness for potential disasters.   

What are some cost-effective disaster recovery solutions for small businesses?  

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): The ubiquity of cloud infrastructure allows small enterprises to enjoy the benefits of a robust disaster recovery plan. These solutions enable organizations of all sizes to create the necessary infrastructure and processes customized to their budget and recovery needs.     

Many of these solutions support cloud, physical (Arcserve Appliances), and virtual infrastructure, as well as virtual standby for emergency application failover and failback. In these scenarios, costs are often tied to the amount and frequency of data backups while supporting cost-effective cloud storage solutions to make these capabilities available to organizations of all sizes.   

How should a disaster recovery plan address cyber threats such as ransomware attacks?  

Ransomware is an ever-present and growing danger for enterprises of all sizes. Your DRP should address these three strategic scenarios: prevention, identification, and recovery.   

Preventing ransomware attacks includes a wide variety of practices and tools, from employee education on cybersecurity best practices and access management controls to rigorous software updates and endpoint protection solutions. Identifying ransomware is much easier with the introduction of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and anomaly detection tools that can help flag irregular or suspicious network activity.   

The attackers know that most organizations rely on their existing backups to recover from ransomware attacks. That's why they often target these backups, making the recovery process even more challenging. For this reason, it is crucial to have well-defined data resilience and recovery procedures in place as part of a robust DRP. These procedures are essential because they ensure that recovery is possible even after such attacks on data backups.  

What are the best practices for data backup and restoration in a disaster recovery plan?  

The standard and battle-tested approach to data backup is to employ the 3-2-1-1 strategy:   

• Keep three (3) copies of the data: it is recommended to have three copies of the data to ensure data redundancy and mitigate the risk of data loss. This includes the original data and two backup copies.  
• Store the backups on two (2) different types of media, such as hard drives, tapes, or cloud storage. This approach safeguards against potential failures or vulnerabilities to a single type of media. 
• Keep one (1) copy offsite, in the cloud, or secure storage; this is crucial in a physical disaster or localized event that could compromise the primary data and on-premises backups.  
• Maintain one (1) immutable copy of your data; it refers to a backup that cannot be modified, overwritten, or deleted. This copy is resistant to ransomware attacks and accidental data alterations.  

In addition to the 3-2-1-1 strategy, it is essential to establish an automated backup regiment that aligns with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements defined in your organization's disaster recovery plan. This automated approach ensures that your data is backed up consistently and without human intervention.