Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is an organisations ability to restore access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster event, whether natural or caused by human action (or error). DR is considered a subset of business continuity, explicitly focusing on ensuring that the IT systems that support critical business functions are operational as soon as possible after a disruptive event occurs.
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Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial for any business, especially those operating either partially or entirely in the cloud. Disasters that interrupt service and cause data loss can happen anytime without warning, your network could have an outage, a critical bug could get released, or your business might have to weather a natural disaster. Organizations with robust and well-tested disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and resume core operations rapidly when things go awry.
What is considered a disaster?
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DR planning and strategies focus on responding to and recovering from disasters—events that disrupt or completely stop a business from operating.
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While these events can be natural disasters like a hurricane, they can also be caused by a severe system failure, an intentional attack, or even human error.
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Types of disasters can include:
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Natural disasters (for example, earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, or wildfires)
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Pandemics and epidemics
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Cyber attacks (for example, malware, DDoS, and ransomware attacks)
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Other intentional, human-caused threats such as terrorist or biochemical attacks
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Technological hazards (for example, power outages, pipeline explosions, and transportation accidents)
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Machine and hardware failure
BUSINESS IMPERATIVES OF DISASTER RECOVERY
Protection against
data loss
Mitigate downtime impact
Regulatory compliance
Protection from Ransomware
Uphold business reputation
Importance of disaster recovery
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Technology plays an increasingly important role in every aspect of business, with applications and services enabling companies to be more agile, available, and connected. This trend has contributed to the widespread adoption of cloud computing by organizations to drive growth, innovation, and exceptional customer experience.
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However, the migration to cloud environments public, private, hybrid, or multicloud and the rise of remote workforces are introducing more infrastructure complexity and potential risks. Disaster recovery for cloud-based systems is critical to an overall business continuity strategy. A system breakdown or unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for enterprises that rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep things running smoothly.
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In addition, data privacy laws and standards stipulate that most organizations are now required to have a disaster recovery strategy. Failure to follow DR plans can result in compliance violations and steep regulatory fines.
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Every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event that stops day-to-day operations, no matter what industry or size. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage that can lead to lost customers and revenue.
Challenges of traditional disaster recovery solutions
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Inefficient Use of Resources
Deploying a traditional disaster recovery target site requires significant investments. Organizations need to buy or lease hardware, purchase software licenses, invest in real-estate and more. However, a DR target needs to be at production scale only at the time of outage, when the production data center is down. In other words, organizations end up spending significant amounts of money on spare capacity for a potential outage and this capacity is unused most of the time.
Significant Complexity and Manual Effort
Many organizations rely only on data replication or application-based protection to prepare workloads against disasters. However, minimizing data loss is just part of a DR solution. A comprehensive DR plan includes powering up Alpha sequentially while taking into consideration dependencies between the different applications, running scripts, assigning IP addresses to Alpha , and connecting Alpha to storage pools. These tasks are complex and require significant manual effort. Organizations that implement only data replication or application-based protection therefore need to perform many DR tasks manually, exposing them to errors and to weeks, sometimes even months, of down time.
Inefficient and Disruptive Testing
Effective DR plans need to keep up with application changes and upgrades. In order to ensure that a DR plan is up-to-date organizations need to perform frequent DR tests, with best practices suggesting performing a test at least once per quarter. Without the right tools, these tests are either not possible or very disruptive to daily operations. Many organizations are required by law to perform DR tests and to present the results in an audit. In addition to the effort required to perform the tests, writing detailed reports is complicated and time-consuming.
Reliance on Scarce Personnel
Finding the right talent is time-consuming and expensive. This problem is exacerbated when organizations try to recruit IT employees who are in high demand. Even after IT employees are hired, they are often tasked with multiple responsibilities and are stretched thin. Furthermore, it is often the case that only a couple of key employees are responsible for DR, exposing organizations to risks in case of personnel changes.
Scaling to Growing Amounts of Data
Even after deploying a DR solution, many organizations run into problems scaling it as the amount of their data, and the number of their applications increases. Scaling a DR target means more than simply buying more storage devices. Organizations need to spend a significant amount of time on planning, leasing additional real estate, negotiating with vendors, re-configuring the network, adjusting security policies, and more. As a result, organizations are not as agile as they could be, hampering their ability to meet their business goals.
Alpha Systems Disaster Recovery Solutions
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Alpha Systems Site Recovery is a cost-effective solution that helps organizations overcome the challenges of the high inefficiency costs associated with traditional DR. In addition, organizations can choose to protect their Alpha systems Cloud on AWS SDDCs operating in one AWS Region with a failover target in another AWS Region. The required Alpha systems software for DR is included in this service and, during normal operations, you need to size your environment based only on storage needs. When a failover is initiated, the DR target environment could be expanded easily to accommodate all the protected workloads. Alpha systems Site Recovery enables organizations to create recovery plans that fully automate and orchestrate failovers, allowing IT teams to offload manual tasks during the recovery process. At the heart of our DR solution is Site Recovery Manager (SRM). This proven DR tool, which is included in the Site Recovery service, helps organizations reduce risks during critical times when their main data center is down. Alpha systems Site Recovery has extensive built-in testing capabilities. Site Recovery enables users to perform frequent non-disruptive DR tests that automatically generate detailed reports, reducing the exposure to disasters. The Alpha systems Site Recovery DR target on Alpha systems Cloud on AWS is fully maintained and supported by Alpha systems , relieving organizations of the need to set up a secure environment, maintain hardware, and manage the lifecycle of their infrastructure stack. Alpha systems Cloud on AWS is operated and supported by highly trained experts, allowing organizations’ IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and reducing the exposure should key employees leave. Alpha systems Site Recovery is built on the global elastic cloud environment of Alpha systems Cloud on AWS, enabling the ability to scale users’ DR target in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks.​
Prepare your environment for disaster avoidance, compliance audits and protect critical data and applications while taking advantage of cloud flexibility and economics.
