Disaster recovery (DR) ensures that your data processing operations continue after a catastrophic event. DR includes data replication and backup.
Use this template to document the steps to recover from a disaster. Document critical details like communication strategies, contingency operations, and backup locations. Easily customize the template for specific teams or business functions.
Backups
Keeping copies of your data protects you from several risks including hardware failure, human error, cyber attacks and natural disaster. These backups allow you to return your systems to a prior good state so you can continue operations. Backups may be complete, incremental or differential, but they should include all files that have changed since the last backup.
An important part of the disaster recovery plan is to define which data to backup and how often. This is usually determined by a risk assessment and business impact analysis conducted by an IT team with knowledge of your business processes. This information determines the amount of time you can tolerate for applications to fail and a recovery point objective (RPO) that dictates how frequently you back up your data.
This data backup policy should also provide guidance on which backup technology to use, such as point-in-time copies or instant recovery. These technologies take a snapshot of a database and create a virtual machine that has the data needed to restore it from backup. Alternatively, you could choose to implement a managed service solution such as IBM’s Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service, which can help you meet your RPO and RTO goals with minimal downtime. This type of solution can eliminate the need to maintain expensive IT infrastructure, which can be vulnerable to cyber attacks and other threats.
Site Recovery
A disaster recovery site is a place where critical systems and applications can be moved to during a disaster. The site can be used to restore data from database backups and provide failover capabilities. It is important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. This can save the company time and money in case of a disaster.
The process of creating a disaster recovery plan includes creating replicas, which are identical copies of source VMs. This allows you to create a consistent environment and reduces application downtime. VM replicas are also more secure than backups.
When a recovery plan is created, it is important to test the plan. This can be done by using the VMware recovery manager software. This software monitors system changes and saves the changes as a restore point. These restore points allow you to return a production system to its previous state.
The VMware recovery management software also provides network testing options. These options include manually-created test networks that duplicate the production network at the recovery site. They also support VMware NSX integration, which simplifies network configuration. In addition, the software provides the option to disable replication of recent changes during testing. This can extend the amount of time needed to test a recovery plan.
Pre-Production Environment
As part of your disaster recovery plan, your Production environment web and application data is replicated throughout the day and backed up hourly to a pre-production environment through a private IBM SoftLayer network. This process uses high availability disaster recover (HADR) to ensure that your Pre-Production environment is always in a near-ready state. Additionally, backups of key environment and site data, such as SaaS extensions, files, and infrastructure and configuration data are completed daily.
Your Disaster Recovery solution provides a Pre-Production environment that is based on the latest data from your Production environment. This is an important safeguard against loss of business processing capabilities due to a disaster. In addition to a quick failover to the DR environment, your ibm disaster recovery plan also includes a robust resiliency strategy with industry-leading RTOs for restoring your processing capability within four hours.
To support your disaster recovery plans, the IBM Cloud provides multiple data centers, each in a different geographic location. These locations enable you to transfer your production workload from a failed data center to another one, with minimal interruption to your business. Additionally, your ibm disaster recovery plan supports replication across the zones in a region to avoid single points of failure within a zone. This helps to keep your ibm disaster recovery plan running even when one of the IBM Cloud locations is lost due to a natural disaster or equipment failure.