There is still a debate on whether a disaster recovery plan is optional or a necessity for businesses. However, the downtime experienced by Bukalapak, an Indonesian company, where they may lose up to 2.1 billion rupiah in transactional opportunities per hour (Kumparan, 2017), reminded us that having a disaster recovery plan is no longer optional, but an absolute necessity.
Disaster recovery refers to the set of policies and procedures that try to mitigate the impact of a disaster, either natural or man-induced. In making a disaster recovery plan, there are two components that you should determine beforehand. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO is the maximum amount of downtime that your business can handle, whereas RPO is the amount of data you are willing to lose after an incident, meaning that if you do backups every 2 A.M., and a disaster strikes at 10.00 P.M. you have lost 20 hours’ worth of data. Financial institutions, for instance, need to have a low number of RPO and RTO so that transactions are not disrupted, and revenue loss can be minimized.
Having a good disaster recovery plan and solution allow businesses to resume their business activities quickly after an incident happens. By doing so, business losses can be minimized. Additionally, the quicker businesses recover, the greater customer retention will be sustained. With all these benefits, it is surprising that only 30% of businesses have a fully documented disaster recovery strategy in place (StorageCraft, 2018)
Businesses are often confused between disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan. A business continuity plan is a set of plans about how businesses should continue when a disaster strikes, while disaster recovery plan refers to on how IT infrastructure should be recovered when a disaster happens. Thus, a disaster recovery plan is a subset of an overall business continuity plan.
Yes, having a disaster recovery plan is a must in today’s evolving threats, but businesses often find it difficult on how to start creating and implementing one. With disaster recovery solutions from leading brands and more than a decade experience, CTI Group is ready to help you ensure your availability with the right disaster recovery plan.
