{"id":3042,"date":"2016-01-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otava.test\/what-role-does-disaster-recovery-play-in-your-business-continuity-strategy\/"},"modified":"2016-01-22T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T00:00:00","slug":"what-role-does-disaster-recovery-play-in-your-business-continuity-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/what-role-does-disaster-recovery-play-in-your-business-continuity-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"What role does disaster recovery play in your business continuity strategy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve discussed previously, there are many parts to a Business Continuity Plan<\/a>, but\u00a0what makes IT disaster recovery<\/a> such an important subset?<\/p>\n

For starters, many businesses are relying more and more on IT infrastructure as they become more digitized. They need connectivity, networks, and servers. Some of these companies are being forced to recognize the growing trend to move everything to the cloud, such as the healthcare industry, where HIPAA compliance<\/a> requires everyone to have an electronic health record as of 2014, while others simply want to stay ahead.<\/p>\n

A disaster recovery plan is meant to put a system in place to restore IT operations at an alternate site after a major system failure or catastrophic event. After successfully failing over to your recovery site, the goal is to test the affected systems and put them back into place. Once this is done, your business can get back to focusing on what it does best — generating revenue. Why is this plan so important? Consider what you\u2019re protecting: your critical infrastructure and sensitive data, such as patient information or credit card records. Can you afford the risk of not having a disaster recovery plan in place?<\/p>\n

What does disaster recovery entail, exactly?<\/p>\n

RPO and RTO<\/strong><\/p>\n

RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective, and it\u2019s the specific amount of time that a business decides it can survive a period of data loss. When you decide how often you need to back up your data \u2013 whether that\u2019s every five minutes, or every five hours \u2013 that is your RPO.<\/p>\n

RTO, on the other hand, stands for Recovery Time Objective, and is the most amount of time a business can afford to have their systems unavailable.\u00a0RTO can help you determine which facets of your business are mission-critical and which aren\u2019t. For example, if you\u2019re an e-business whose email server was down for an hour but caused you to lose 12 hours\u2019 worth of emailing clients, how would that affect your ability to serve your clients? Can you afford to be down for an hour?<\/p>\n

Determining your RPO and RTO is one step in your overall business continuity plan. When you figure out how much time you can or can\u2019t afford to lose during a disaster, you can prepare for the worst that much better.<\/p>\n

How do I plan for disaster recovery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to FEMA, a recovery strategy should be developed for each component. There are four of them:<\/p>\n