Data centers are the backbone of most businesses’ IT operations. When an enterprise IT system experiences disruption, this can cause significant downtime, lost revenue, and damage to a business’s reputation. This makes having a thorough data center disaster recovery plan is vital for any business, allowing businesses to minimize downtime and quickly resume operations after unexpected incidents.
In this article, we cover the key aspects of a data center disaster recovery plan. These include key goals, a step-by-step guide and an insight into the role of virtualization.
What is a Data Center Recovery Plan?
Data Center Recovery Plan – cheat sheet
✅ Data centers can be susceptible to natural disasters, power outages and system failures.
✅Thorough preparation for the possibility of IT failures or other disasters is crucial to be able to bounce back quickly.
✅ Evernex can optimize and support your IT infrastructure to help recover from unexpected issues.
A data center recovery plan, also known as a disaster recovery plan, is a set of procedures and policies which ensure that an organization can continue to operate following a disaster. A robust, comprehensive plan is a vital part of any business IT maintenance strategy.
A disaster can be any event that disrupts the normal operations of a data center. This includes natural disasters, cyberattacks or power outages.
Why do you need a data center recovery plan?
Disaster recovery
Continued operations even in the face of a disaster are vital for business productivity. Disasters can happen at any time, and they can have a devastating impact on businesses. Downtime can result in lost revenue, damaged reputation, and even legal liabilities.
For example, if a hospital experiences a data center outage, this can affect patient care. This in turn could lead to legal and financial consequences. A real-life case of such a disaster is the 2023 ransonmware cyber attack on the British Library. While the overall cost of the attack and recovery are still being calculated, the Financial Times estimated that recovery could cost £6-7 million.
A data center disaster recovery plan is essential for businesses to protect themselves as far as possible from the consequences of unexpected, large-scale problems.
Post-data center migration
Data center recovery plans are most associated with disaster scenarios. However, enterprises should also use these recovery processes following a data center relocation or migration. These complex moves, especially if not managed by professional service providers such as Evernex, can risk data loss, downtime and compliance issues.
As a result, it is not only necessary to establish a comprehensive data center migration plan before starting the process, but also a robust recovery plan. Examples of data center recovery processes post-migration include:
- Testing applications and configurations
- Validating data integrity
- Confirming that security measures are functional
- Data restoration in the case of loss or corruption
Such tasks facilitate business continuity by helping to get data center operations up and running quickly and securely, as well as efficiently recovering critical data.
What are the key components of a data center recovery plan?
An effective data center disaster recovery strategy should include the following elements:
- Redundancy: Redundant systems ensure that critical business functions can continue during or following a disaster.
- Recovery objectives: Recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) are vital metrics when planning your disaster recovery plan.
- The RPO means the maximum data loss a company can accept. Businesses measure this in the time between the last backup executed and the system failure.
- The RTO refers to the maximum length of downtime a business can tolerate when restoring operations following a disaster.
- Data backup and recovery: Back up data regularly and store it offsite, such as in airgap solutions like tape libraries. This ensures its availability following a disaster.
- Cloud-based solutions: Cloud services and solutions can provide additional redundancy and flexibility, allowing for faster recovery times.
- Regular testing and maintenance: Regularly testing and maintaining the disaster recovery plan is key to ensuring its consistent effectiveness.
- Staff training: Staff should receive training on the disaster recovery plan, including their responsibilities when disaster strikes.
What are the goals of a disaster recovery plan?
The main objective of a data center disaster recovery plan is to get a business’s up and running as soon as possible, with minimal damage. However, this main goal incorporates several, more specific, benefits. These include:
| Reason | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Minimizing downtime | Downtime can be costly for businesses. Therefore, minimizing the time that critical business functions are offline is a key goal of a disaster recovery plan. |
| Reducing data loss | Data loss can have serious consequences for businesses. Effective data recovery minimizes the amount of data lost or corrupted in a disaster. |
| Ensuring business continuity | A disaster recovery plan should ensure that key business functions can continue, even in the face of an incident. This allows businesses to continue generating revenue and providing essential services to customers. |
| Protecting data and assets | A disaster recovery plan should aim to protect critical data and assets from damage or loss during a disaster. This includes physical assets such as hardware, as well as digital assets such as information and applications. |
| Meeting regulatory requirements | Many industries have regulatory requirements that businesses must meet to operate legally. Data center disaster recovery plans help businesses to comply with these standards, for example by ensuring that sensitive data is secure and available during and after an incident. |
How to create a reliable IT disaster recovery plan: your checklist
Now you know why your business needs a data center disaster recovery plan, it is time to set one up. An effective IT disaster recovery plan checklist should include the following key steps:
Risk assessment
A thorough risk assessment is the first step in creating a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Risk assessments involve identifying potential threats to all aspects of a data center, covering software, data and hardware assets. The assessment then evaluates the likelihood of those risks occurring. This step helps businesses to understand what threats they are facing and to prioritize their disaster recovery efforts accordingly.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A Business Impact Analysis identifies critical business functions, such as transactions and order fulfillment, and determines how long they can be offline before significantly affecting the business. This step helps businesses to determine their recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), as well as prioritize their most important assets.
Recovery strategies
After identifying your data center’s risks and critical business functions, the next step is to determine the appropriate recovery strategies. These processes restore said functions following a disaster. Recovery strategies may include:
- Data backup and recovery
- Redundant systems, networks and sites
- Cloud-based solutions, such as Backup-as-a-Service or Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service
- Automated failover, which switches processes from the primary data center setup to a backup system in the case of a failure
Plan development
You should document the disaster recovery plan in detail and include step-by-step procedures for each recovery strategy. The plan should also include:
- Contact information for key personnel and stakeholders.
- Explanations of what each step involves.
- The planned maintenance schedule.
Testing and maintenance
Regular testing and maintenance of the disaster recovery plan is essential to ensure that it remains effective. Testing should be conducted at least annually, and any issues identified should be addressed promptly.
What are some top disaster recovery strategies?
Some of the most popular and important tactics and resources in a modern disaster recovery plan include:
Back-up-as-a-Service
BaaS is a service offered by third-party providers. This service stores a business’s data outside of the primary data center, often in a cloud. This helps businesses securely access and restore their data when necessary.
Disaster Recovery as a Service
While BaaS focuses on data storage and restoration, DRaaS provides a full replica of your IT environment. This includes servers, applications, storage, and network configurations. Normally, service providers maintain these replicas in the cloud or a secondary site.
This means that in the case of a total failure or physical disaster, an enterprise has access to a copy of their entire IT infrastructure.
Failovers with redundant systems and sites
Both DRaaS and BaaS are outsourced services, but companies can also implement their own automated failover strategies. In this approach, a business maintains its own redundant systems and back-up sites, which stay synchronized with the primary environment. The organization can then automate failover mechanisms, so that if there is a problem or system failure, processes switch over seamlessly to the backup version with human intervention.
This allows for continued operations, minimizing the productivity loss associated with downtime.
Minimize risk during your data center relocation
Ensure maximum uptime and security while moving your IT infrastructure with Evernex’s end-to-end relocation services.
Data center relocation services
How does virtualization help with disaster recovery in a data center?
Virtualization is the process of creating virtual versions of computing resources such as servers, storage devices, and networks. Virtualization can help with disaster recovery within a data center in several ways:
| How? | Why? |
|---|---|
| Faster recovery times | With virtualization, businesses can quickly move virtual machines to a different physical server, reducing recovery times. |
| Improved flexibility | Virtualization allows for the easy creation of redundant systems. This permits improved flexibility and resiliency in the face of disaster or failures. |
| Lower costs | Virtualization can reduce hardware costs by allowing multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server. |
| Simplified management | Virtualization can simplify disaster recovery management by facilitating easy testing and maintenance of virtual machines. |
Following the steps outlined in this article allows businesses to develop effective disaster recovery and business continuity plans. These strategies protect data and assets, allowing for smooth business operations even in the event of a disaster.
Evernex partners with companies across the world to keep their IT infrastructures robust and operational, at a lower cost to our clients’ budgets and the planet.
Frequently Asked Questions about Data Center Recovery Plans
What should a data center disaster recovery plan include?
An effective data center disaster recovery plan should cover risk assessments, metrics such as Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), testing and validation methods and practical measures to minimize data loss and downtime. For a more complete checklist, see the article above.
What is the difference between DR and business continuity?
Data center disaster recovery refers to a plan which gets business IT infrastructure up and running quickly and securely after an incident. Business continuity means carrying on normal operations without disruption.
How often should a DR plan be tested?
A business should test its DR plan at least once per year.
What are the main risks in data center disaster recovery?
The primary risks of a recovery process include human error and poor communication. This can manifest as a failure to test plans, incorrect restoration of data, or misconfigurations in backup sites and systems. This is why it is a good idea to employ a trained disaster recovery team to manage the plan and execution on your behalf.