Title: Disaster Recovery
Course: 2016FA-MCO-110-401 > Section: Module 12: Disaster Recovery

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What is a Disaster?

A disaster is an event or incident that is not anticipated. It could be from a natural disaster, an act of war, an act of terrorism, or even a technological event. Disaster can cause loss of life, injuries, property damage, and disruption, loss and distress to mission critical operations [1].

Even though a disaster typically happens with little to no warning, proper planning is important. Planning ahead for disaster helps to prepare employees, provides ideas as to what items and supplies need to be kept on hand in case of a disaster, and is the first step to having success in recovering from a disaster [2].

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the combination or “whole package” of planning, policies, procedures, testing, strategies, and actual implementation that go into improving the resiliency of an operation [2]. The cost and scope of DR in any operation depends on the complexity of it and upon the needs of that specific operation. (Some operations require more redundancies and backups than others.)

The importance of DR can be hard for some to imagine since disasters do not happen often. However the importance becomes clearer when looking at statistics that show that, “…95 percent of companies experience a data outage within a year, and the average cost of downtime is $70,000 per hour. Even worse, seven out of 10 companies that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year [3]”.

Considerations

McCafferty [3] suggests that IT organizations consider the following points when evaluating your DR plan.

- Be sure to address: crisis management, incident response, business continuity, and pandemic planning.
- Consider where data is stored and backed up. Is a cloud solution an option, or would another off-site back-up be better for your needs.
- Are applications backed up in order to work after a disaster?
- Communication are vitally important. Have multiple methods of contacting employees and of providing them with access to incident management plans and procedures. Identify social media as an option of ways to communicate with employees.
- Maintain the integrity of data and information.
- Test your DR plan before something happens.
- Reevaluate the risks and have an all-risk awareness approach.
- Testing and training employees together can help with collaboration and coordination.
- Be mindful of the possibility of workplace violence.

[3]

There is no one size fits all plan for disaster recovery. A lot of work must go into tailoring the DR plan for an organization. According to Bovberg [4], some common considerations include:

- Downtime
- Security
- Data Integrity
- Cost
- Ease of Implementation / Simplicity

[4]

Objectives met:
- C12
- 12.1
- 12.2