Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery (DR) is what an organization does to recover from a catastrophic event that impacts on their ability to function at a particular location or in their capacity to use business-as-usual systems and processes. DR is usually a Board and Director level responsibility with the planning for any disasters delegated to various teams within an organization. Most DR planning includes a risk and business impact assessment to identify which functions are critical to the business operations, and a plan to ensure that these services can be reactivated within an agreed period if the DR plan is activated. From an IT perspective, the advent of Cloud computing has made the planning for a disaster somewhat easier. Data and applications can be replicated to a Cloud Infrastructure provider such as Azure or AWS. If required, services can be used from the Cloud instances and in many cases the failover can be made seamless with automatic switching if an IT system suffers an outage.