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What Is Disaster Recovery in IT?

The plan and systems that get your IT running again after an outage, attack or disaster.

Disaster recovery (DR) is the set of plans, systems and procedures that restore your technology after a major disruption: a ransomware attack, a server failure, a fire, a flood, or an extended power or internet outage. Backup is where your data is kept safe. Disaster recovery is how you get back to work from it.

What a disaster recovery plan contains

  • Recovery objectives. How long you can be down (RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose (RPO), set per system. See what are RTO and RPO.
  • System priorities. Which systems come back first: usually identity and email, then line-of-business applications, then everything else.
  • Recovery methods. Restore from backup to existing hardware, fail over to replicated servers in the cloud, or rebuild in a new location.
  • Roles and contacts. Who declares a disaster, who executes, who communicates.
  • Dependencies. Internet, DNS, licensing, vendor contacts, credentials stored somewhere reachable.
  • Test schedule and results.

Disaster recovery vs backup vs business continuity

Backup is a copy of data. Disaster recovery restores technology. Business continuity keeps the business operating while that happens. See backup vs disaster recovery and disaster recovery vs business continuity.

Cloud changes the math

Replicating servers to Azure or another cloud lets a business fail over in minutes rather than rebuild for days. This is disaster recovery as a service; see what is DRaaS. For businesses already running on Microsoft 365 and cloud servers, DR is often more about identity, access and the remaining on-premises pieces than about the whole data center.

Why testing is the whole point

A DR plan that has never been exercised will fail in ways nobody predicted. Annual restore tests and periodic failover tests are what make the plan real.

Mentis Group builds and implements disaster recovery solutions through IT Project Services, and for Fully Managed IT clients, backups and DR are continuously monitored, tested and verified, with recovery objectives reviewed in strategic sessions. We serve businesses across Dallas-Fort Worth and nationwide.

Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.