What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is also known as a disaster recovery implementation plan or an IT disaster recovery plan. It is a documented policy and process that helps an organization execute recovery processes in an unfortunate event to protect a business IT infrastructure and, more broadly, promote recovery.

DRP is crucial for any business. It identifies the purpose and objective of the plan and the people responsible for its implementation. It is essential to have a plan in case of an emergency. This article will explain the importance of having a disaster recovery system in place for your business.

Disaster Recovery Plan Goals

A disaster recovery plan’s goal is a series of steps that must be taken before, during, and after a natural or man-made disaster so that everyone on the team can follow them. A disaster recovery plan should address both purposeful and unintentional man-made disasters, such as the consequences of terrorism or hacking, as well as accidental disasters, such as equipment failure.

Your disaster recovery plan should contain goals for RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective).

• RTO is the amount of time a business can be down in a disaster. It should be as short as possible – for example, four hours is the maximum acceptable downtime. The RTO is determined by how much the interruption disrupts regular operations and how much income is lost per unit hour due to the disaster. These characteristics, in turn, are dependent on the equipment and application in question (s). The length of an RTO is expressed in seconds, minutes, hours, or days. It’s crucial to include in a catastrophe recovery plan (DRP).
• The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the amount of time that passes during a disruption before the amount of data lost exceeds the Business Continuity Plan’s maximum permitted threshold or “tolerance. For example, if the last available good copy of data is from 18 hours ago and the RPO for this firm is 20 hours, we are still inside the maximum allowable threshold. In other words, it answers the question, “Up to what point in time might the business process be recovered given the volume of data lost during that interval?”

DR plan goal covers the procedures for contacting support and escalating issues. It should also include insurance coverage to protect you from any legal or financial problems that may arise. The disaster recovery plan should have a prioritized list of contacts within the disaster recovery team. You should hire a professional or a recovery solutions provider to help you create your plan. If you do not have a disaster recovery plan, your data will be unavailable to anyone without it.

What are the elements of a DRP?

A disaster recovery plan should have several elements:

• It must define what applications, documents, and resources are critical to the business.
• You should also identify offsite storage and backup procedures.
• A good plan will address the risks and threats associated with any emergency.
• Your DRP should also address the recovery of physical systems. If a disaster strikes, your organization will be ready to handle the crisis.
• This will ensure the continuity of your business.

Measures for Disaster Recovery Plan

Your plan will be broken down into two main parts: preventative measures and corrective measures.

Preventative measures focus on preventing disasters and restoring systems before they occur. In general, avoiding disaster is always the best option. When you’re thinking about preventative measures, you’re thinking about all of the factors that could lead to a disaster. Whether you have daisy-chained power lines or no door lock in your server room, this proactive approach to potential problems can save you a lot of time and effort in the long run.

The corrective measure focuses on repairing and restoring systems after a disaster occurs. Policies and procedures for a wide range of situations should be included in corrective actions. They should also assist you in determining recovery responsibilities for leaders and managers throughout your firm. Always see your BDR strategy as a collaborative effort inside your company.

What is a Disaster Recovery Checklist?

A disaster recovery checklist is an essential document for any organization. It helps minimize the damage caused by unplanned outages. Even a single lost file can significantly disrupt a company’s operations. Because documents are so hard to recover, companies need to ensure they’re properly backed up and stored in a remote location.

The first step in any disaster recovery plan is to identify the specific risk associated with the incident. A business may be at various risks, including natural catastrophes. While these events are rare, they can damage an organization’s reputation and profits. A disaster recovery plan will help minimize the damages while ensuring long-term business operation.

• Many studies have shown that one in four businesses will fail to recover from a disaster, and this statistic is primarily due to a lack of a DRP.
• 93 percent of organizations that lose data access for 10 days or more due to a disaster file for bankruptcy within a year, according to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.

A DRP is like a trekker’s contingency plan, with a comprehensive checklist that outlines the steps to take in case of a crisis.

What should be included in a Disaster Recovery Checklist

Disaster recovery plans often include a detailed checklist. Typical items on a DR checklist include recovery objectives, incident reporting, action response, and recovery procedures. The DR plan should consider your unique business needs and system vulnerabilities. It should be thorough and comprehensive to ensure your success.

As a result, you should employ a disaster recovery checklist that lays out the procedures you’ll need to do to cope with the crisis effectively.

The following items should be included in the disaster recovery plan checklist:

• Perform a risk assessment as well as a business impact analysis.
• Determine your rehabilitation goals.
• Assign roles and tasks to members of a disaster recovery team.
• Make a disaster recovery site.
• Be ready for a setback.
• Keep important documents in a secure area.
• Determine your equipment requirements.
• Make communication channels available.
• Procedures for dealing with disasters in detail
• Notify all relevant parties about the event.
• A disaster recovery plan should be tested and updated regularly.
• Choose the best disaster recovery plan depending on your requirements.

Plan your disaster recovery strategy

A successful disaster recovery plan follows a rigid procedure to rebuild systems that have experienced significant damage or are just too challenging to repair. The same strategy should be used to help define the checklists that give employees the instructions they need to rebuild critical systems in case of a catastrophe.’

You have two options: do-it-yourself disaster recovery (a less expensive but more error-prone approach) or partner with a backup and recovery service provider (reliable and effective option). To evaluate what will work best for you and your team, Protected Harbor considers every facet of your organization (e.g., the number of employees, the size of your IT infrastructure, the available budget, risk issues, and so on).

This leads right back to Protected Harbor’s four-point quick checklist. Are you experiencing slowdowns in connectivity? (If so, you may need more bandwidth.) Are you losing applications or entire systems? (If so, you may need more redundant assets.) Have you ever been breached? (If so, you probably need additional firewalls.) How often do you experience power outages? (If your answer is “too often,” you may need more backup power and generators.) These questions are just the start; Protected Harbor can help determine the answers to these and other questions –– putting you in the best possible position for avoiding disasters. Plan your disaster recovery strategy with us; contact us now.

How to Save your Business Through Backup and Disaster Recovery

The world is increasingly evolving and becoming connected globally. Ever since the inception of the internet, people and businesses have shared and stored their data online. This only means one thing, we have more to lose than ever before. It does not matter what type of business you operate, but your data and protection are vital for your business operations. Before you think that you do not need a data backup or a recovery plan, we would like to clarify a few points that are essential for your business survival:

1. People make mistakes
2. Software or hardware failure may result in the failure of primary data.
3. accidental deletion of data and malicious ransomware attacks may halt your business.

Hence several things are out of our control, and it is essential to have a recovery plan to avoid losing critical business data.

What You Can Do to Save Your Business from Losing Critical Data

1. Have a Disaster Recovery Plan (DR)

A disaster recovery plan is a set of rules and SOPs (standard operating procedure) on a formal document created by the organization. It entails all the details on tackling situations like cyber-attacks, power outages, any act of God, and other disruptive and unexpected events. Having a DR is vital for your business as it ensures that your business operations resume back to normal after an accident has caused an interruption. Without a DR, your company can suffer heavy financial losses, loss of reputation, and unhappy customers. A DR can help in the following ways.

• Control damage and financial loss
• Your employees become trained to tackle unexpected cyber security situations.
• There is a streamlined restoration process and the guidelines to restore and bring business on track.

2. Backup Validation

Backup validation is an integral part of the Disaster Recovery Plan, which allows you to test your backup protocols’ consistency and recoverability. Every data block retrieved from the backup is given a checksum via validation. The sole exception is file-level backups stored in cloud storage, which must be validated. The consistency of the metadata recorded in the backup is checked to ensure validity.

Validation is a time-consuming procedure, even for a tiny incremental or differential backup. This is because the operation verifies the data physically present in the backup and all of the information that can be recovered by selecting the backup. This necessitates access to backups that have already been produced. While successful validation indicates a high likelihood of recovery, it does not examine all elements that affect the recovery process.

It is vital to test backups and restore processes to check if they work. There is a chance that some backup archives are corrupt or damaged, which will hamper the restoration process. You must test the restore process; it helps learn about data recovery from backups should there be a disaster. The testing can also help you learn about real-life risks without losing the actual data.

3. Use Air-Gapped Backups to Isolate the data

An air gapping technique is one of the most popular backup strategies. At any given time, all your business’ critical data shall have a copy stored offline, which will be disconnected and inaccessible via the internet. Air gapping isolates data from unsecured networks or production environments, and they can be stored off-site.

4. In-house Data Recovery Solutions

Your business will greatly benefit from a data backup solution all in-house. It can be a physical server on or off-site. If data backups are on the cloud (online backup), they will take an ample amount of time to get restored, costing you time and money. Some IT companies deploy 10Gb pipe to hosts allowing them great flexibility, and they are never limited to their network. They are cost-effective for small size businesses. The data is also accessible without the internet, which is excellent as it allows access to data 24/7.

Choose your IT management partner carefully.

You must have an excellent IT management partner who can be available for your business 24/7. These IT partners must have the proper skill set, which is an essential first step to ensure your data remains safe and uncompromised. The responsibility to protect crucial business data is vast, and you must work with companies that provide you with excellent customer support. You never know when your data is attacked or compromised.

If you want to ensure your company has the necessary IT infrastructure in place to continue operating during and after a disaster, it’s crucial to partner with a reputable and reliable IT provider. Protected Harbor ensures your data is backed up and is continuously being monitored to ensure its integrity so that we’d be able to restore your data should it ever get lost or corrupted. By working with Protected Harbor, you can have peace of mind knowing that your business is protected, no matter what happens.

Above all, it is vital to have a backup plan. The strategies outlined in this article will help you to achieve that. Armed with the knowledge of how to recover your business after a disaster, you can be confident that your investors and employees will thank you. With Protected Harbor by your side, you will be better prepared for any eventuality, and in this case, that’s going to count for a lot. Contact us now.

The importance of owning your remote servers and using a dedicated protected cloud.

If you’re a business owner, then there’s a good chance this question must have crossed your mind to own your equipment and servers. Just remember, “owning” your equipment doesn’t mean the computers and systems in your office. Likely, you are already using a hosting web service or server for your business needs. After carefully considering your unique business needs, it would be best if you decided between onsite or off-site servers. Read along, and we’ll make the decision easy for you.

Onsite servers to Off-site servers; The trend

In 2021 more than 50% of the organizations moved their workloads to off-site or cloud servers. Managed service companies (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) are gaining traction with their one size fits all solutions. Keeping an onsite physical server and equipment and maintaining the infrastructure is costly. But there are other reasons motivating businesses to move to an off-site setting.

• Onsite hosting has limited connectivity and accessibility than off-site hosting, which has unlimited capabilities.
• Remote and geographic expansion are more realistic in an off-site and cloud environment.
• The physical space of onsite housing servers incurs real estate and energy charges; off-site servers do not.
• Storing your data in a colocation datacenter is cost-effective, removing the need for in-house IT costs.
• The upfront costs of the physical equipment and server are significant for most businesses.

These technology barrier costs are causing the shift to datacenter solutions or dedicated off-site servers. Put, a datacenter solution or dedicated server is an option dedicated solely to your business needs and purposes. No other individual can access the server; it’s your data in our datacenter.

A closer look at AWS servers

The most popular dedicated off-site solution is Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. But how do you choose what’s best for your business? They all follow the pay-per-user approach and additional services and products needed over time, adding to costs as you grow.

Since AWS dominates the field, we will focus on just Amazon’s platform. The first thing to consider is that “You want solutions, not a platform.” For example, Office365 is a solution to edit and create documents, while Microsoft Azure is the cloud platform that hosts 365 and other programs online. Thus Amazon is a platform – not a solution. Amazon gives you cloud space for rent, with unpredictable costs as your business needs rise and fall.

You will not see an automatic performance improvement when you move your company’s workflow and applications into AWS. For that, you would need a dedicated protected-cloud environment and an intelligent, distributed database. Just hosting your applications on AWS does not mean you will have the ability to use those programs and computing resources efficiently. You have to meet AWS system requirements; AWS does not have to meet yours. If you want data backups and recovery, you have to do it yourself.

With AWS, Azure, and other popular server options, you only get a Virtual Machine (VM) and a console to work from. It is your responsibility to manage, maintain, and secure that VM. For example, with AWS, someone has to customize the CPU utilization limits, check to ensure the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume doesn’t hit the IOPS or throughput limits, and increase your read or write performance using parallelization. It sounds like more of a problem than a solution

Also, it has been proven that AWS cloud is not as secure as your datacenter. The world JUST experienced an AWS outage, interrupting the operations for thousands of people and loss of business downright. Not only do you lose flexibility and cost-effective scalability with AWS and Azure. But you lose the reliability and stability you thought you were getting with the Amazon and Microsoft name.

The bottom line is if you work with GPU, AI, or large data sets, you need someone to manage and personalize your IT infrastructure. Moving to a dedicated protected cloud solution lets you customize the server environment to improve AWS.

What is the alternative?

With a dedicated protected cloud, someone constantly monitors your private environment to make sure everything goes smoothly and is customized to the company’s requirements. Actual IT management means knowing when to optimize the storage and network layers to support your extensive data set. Unlike AWS and Azure who will slow down your traffic moving between VM’s –unless you pay additional fees – we can help optimize applications to respond to requests made to these large data sets in a remote environment, with no extra cost.

Before anything, we always have an expert examine the applications a business uses, how exactly employees use those applications in a daily workflow and finally review the data loads involved to figure out what needs to be done to make this run properly. Having a team that understands and develops personalized Technology Improvement Plans (TIP) gets your business more bang for the buck than AWS or on-prem.

This is the gist of overall performance, Bottom line? You want to opt for a service that offers 99.99% uptime with reliable IT support. We improve the environment to give you the best performance for your workload. Not the opposite way around. For example, for a single client, we don’t have to tune the S2D. But we do because we have it and want to give them the best performance possible.

Check out our post on how dedicated servers are a safer alternative. But that doesn’t mean you are 100% safe from attackers. To ensure the safety of the data, consider providers with built-in features like Application Outage Avoidance (AOA) and complete network monitoring to handle issues before they are critical…

So, despite all of the above facts, if you’re still crazy enough to go with AWS cloud, that’s your decision. Irrespectively, if you’re not terrified by the lower and fixed price complete solution, best infrastructure setup and system monitoring, or our team doing the magic for your business, in that case, we at Protected Harbor will be more than happy to give you all the solutions you need.

Outages and Downtime; Is it a big deal?

Downtime and outages are costly affairs for any company. According to research and industry survey by Gartner, as much as $300000 per hour the industry loses on an average. It is a high priority for a business owner to safeguard your online presence from unexpected outages. Imagine how your clients feel when they visit your website only to find an “Error: website down” or “Server error” message. Or half your office is unable to log in and work.

You may think that some downtime once in a while wouldn’t do much harm to your business. But let me tell you, it’s a big deal.

Downtime and outages are hostile to your business

Whether you’re a large company or a small business, IT outages can cost you exorbitantly. With time, more businesses are becoming dependent on technology and cloud infrastructure. Also, the customer’s expectations are increasing, which means if your system is down and they can’t reach you, they will move elsewhere. Since every customer is valuable, you don’t want to lose them due to an outage. Outages and downtime affect your business in many underlying ways.

Hampers Brand Image

While all the ways outages impact your business, this is the worst and affects you in the long run. It completely demolishes a business structure that took a while to build. For example, suppose a customer regularly experiences outages that make using the services and products. In that case, they will switch to another company and share their negative experiences with others on social platforms. Poor word of mouth may push away potential customers, and your business’s reputation takes a hit.

Loss of productivity and business opportunities

If your servers crash or IT infrastructure is down, productivity and profits follow. Employees and other parties are left stranded without the resources to complete their work. Network outages can bring down the overall productivity, which we call a domino effect. This disrupts the supply chain, which multiplies the impact of downtime. For example, a recent outage of AWS (Amazon Web Services) affected millions of people, their supply chain, and delivery of products and services across all of their platforms and third-party companies sharing the same platform.

For the companies who depend on online sales, server outage and downtime is a nightmare. Any loss of networking means customers won’t have access to your products or services online. It will lead to fewer customers and lesser revenues. It is a best-case scenario if the outage is resolved quickly, but imagine if the downtime persists for hours or days and affects a significant number of online customers. A broken sales funnel discourages customers from doing business with you again. There the effects of outages can be disastrous.

So how do you prevent system outages?

Downtime and outages are directly related to the server and IT infrastructure capabilities. It can be simplified into Anticipation, Monitoring, and Response. To cover these aspects, we created a full-proof strategy that is AOA (Application Outage Avoidance), or in simpler words, we also call it Always on Availability. In AOA, we set up several things to prevent and tackle outages.

• First of which is to anticipate and be proactive. We prepare in advance for possible scenarios and keep them in check.
• The second thing is in-depth monitoring of the servers. We don’t just check if a server is up or down- we look at RAM, CPU, disk performance, application performance metrics such as page life expectancy inside of SQL. Then we tie the antivirus directly into our monitoring system. If Windows Defender detects an infected file, it triggers an alert in our monitoring system so we can respond within 5 minutes and quarantine/cleans the infected file.
• The final big piece of this is geo-blocking and blacklisting. Our edge firewalls block entire countries and block bad IPs by reading and updating public IP blacklists every 4 hours to keep up with the latest known attacks. We use a windows failover cluster which eliminates a single point of failure. For example, the client will remain online if a host goes down.
• Other features include- Ransomware, Viruses and Phishing attack protection, complete IT support, and a private cloud backup which has led to us achieving a 99.99% uptime for our clients.

These features are implemented into Protected Harbor’s systems and solutions to enable an optimum level of control and advanced safety and security. IT outages can be frustrating, but actively listen to clients to build a structure to support your business and workflow – achieving a perfect mix of IT infrastructure and business operations.

Visit Protected Harbor to end outages and downtime once and for all.