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IT- Disaster Recovery for a Business Continuity

IT  disaster  recovery  consists  of  developing  step-by-step  procedures  for  a  full recovery, disaster avoidance and business continuity.

When many think about DR, they usually think about Backup, while it is only one piece in BC-DR puzzle and inefficient for a continuity of business operations in an event of a disaster.

Backup is not disaster recovery (DR) based on following points:

  • Failure of backup software
  • Service Levels: backups typically happen twice per day which means that a RTO will be significantly higher and RPO could be ~12 hours data loss which is not acceptable for critical applications in DR concept.
  • Reverse Replication: in an event of an outage, once an application has been made available on a target site, you must extend that application’s protection to include new data being created. A backup solution can not start taking backups and ship them back to a production site, yet a DR solution will ensure that an application is still protected by replicating back to a source site.
  • Application Impact: backups occur at night because, making a copy of an application and its data load a CPU on a server and impacts significantly end-user productivity.

Every institution large or small should have both a backup mechanism and disaster recovery solution in place; they are complementary pieces to a same puzzle. 

Mitigation Measures for Some IT- Hazards

 

POSSIBLE RISK

MITIGATION MEASURE

DOWNTIME

 

•     Hardware

•     Software

 

•     Redundancy

•     Maintenance and upgrade of software

NETWORK

 

•     Unreliable network

 

•     Loss of connectivity

 

•     Traffic

•     Misconfiguration

 

 

 

•     Design and monitor a network for a maximum reliability

•     Physical protection, Redundancy or diverse paths

•     Network segmentation

•     Installation of firewalls to ensure security

•     Load balancing (Intelligent direction to backup site)

•     Use automation to deploy changes, test all configurations in a lab environment before making changes on your production devices.

DATA AND APPLICATION

 

•     File corruption

•     Application downtime

•     Malicious software

 

 

 

•     Data backup

•     Mirroring of application, load balancing and replication

•     Security management and installation of antivirus

 

EQUIPMENT FAILURES

 

•     Server failure

•     Server Overload

•     Other Hardware

•     Old equipment

 

 

 

•     Redundant disks, Backups, SAN / NAS

•     Load balancer/Monitoring/virtualization

•     Regular maintenance

•     Planning for upgrades and replacing out-of-date equipment.

POWER

 

•     Power Outage

•     Equipment failure

 

 

 

•     Redundancy and backup power supply (UPS and Generators)

•     Monitoring and performing preventative maintenance regularly.

ATTACKS

 

•     DDoS

•     Viruses

•     Hackers

•     Other attacks

 

 

 

•     Managed security services/anti-DDoS

•     Installation of antivirus

•     Firewall and other security features

•     Access control system

HUMAN ERROR

 

•     File deletion

•     Unskilled  people

•     Fire

 

•     Regular backup

•     Access management

•     Training / Staff certification requirements

•     Fire detection system, fire extinguisher and fire hydrant

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