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
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MITIGATION MEASURE
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DOWNTIME
• Hardware
• Software
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• Redundancy
• Maintenance and upgrade of software
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NETWORK
• Unreliable network
• Loss of connectivity
• Traffic
• Misconfiguration
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• 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.
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DATA AND APPLICATION
• File corruption
• Application downtime
• Malicious software
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• Data backup
• Mirroring of application, load balancing and replication
• Security management and installation of antivirus
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EQUIPMENT FAILURES
• Server failure
• Server Overload
• Other Hardware
• Old equipment
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• Redundant disks, Backups, SAN / NAS
• Load balancer/Monitoring/virtualization
• Regular maintenance
• Planning for upgrades and replacing out-of-date equipment.
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POWER
• Power Outage
• Equipment failure
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• Redundancy and backup power supply (UPS and Generators)
• Monitoring and performing preventative maintenance regularly.
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ATTACKS
• DDoS
• Viruses
• Hackers
• Other attacks
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• Managed security services/anti-DDoS
• Installation of antivirus
• Firewall and other security features
• Access control system
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HUMAN ERROR
• File deletion
• Unskilled people
• Fire
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• Regular backup
• Access management
• Training / Staff certification requirements
• Fire detection system, fire extinguisher and fire hydrant
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