The concept of disaster recovery gained momentum in the computing landscape with incidents like tsunami or 9/11 terror attacks, which brought to fore the criticality of multiple disaster recovery sites spread across geographies.  But over the years, IT and crisis managers have struggled to create a seamless topology for DR due to various inhibitions in term of cost, management, and availability of technologies.  The fundamental challenge in DR is the breadth of services that needs to be safely replicated and restored with least downtimes in this age of 24x7 uptime.

Business continuity cannot be considered as just a best practice as it’s the vital link that secures enterprises digital assets.  Clearly a multi-pronged approach is the one that will safeguard data, whether it is applications or user generated content.  Experts believe that in any DR Strategy, the one common denominator that makes for smooth transition in the event of a disaster is that the strategy must pave the way for full recovery of the data with least lead times.  In the last few years, concepts like virtualization have made DR much more complicated as a separate continuity plan has to be made for data within the virtual servers.  So a successful DR Plan has to create a DR infrastructure that ahs highly scalable computing resources right from processing power to storage capacities.

So a starting premise of any good DR Strategy is in creating an infrastructure that can aid business continuity and enable full recovery of data as well as apps accessed by the users.  Though concepts like mirroring can clone the data everyday but hue to the cost factors all enterprises cannot afford it.  Here experts suggest that a DR approach based on tiered classification of data on the basis of its mission criticality and type of storage will help in managing the economics better.  For example, it’s not a wise decision to rely only on tape drives for backing up critical data as at times it is not possible to recover fully from tape drives.

So the three factors a CIO have to consider in as on demand DR is hardware, apps and data replication.  This will create a DR backbone that is standardized and tuned to the digital asset creation of the company. For instance, an IP driven company in high-end modeling must invest in DR hardware that suits the memory and process intensive backup processes and any small mismatch will lead to the secondary site data not replicated in full. 

So at the end of the day, DR as concept has to be embedded in the company’s business process.  It has to be an ecosystem that’s policy driven and powered by the best of breed technologies with lots of self-healing computing capabilities.  While investing in DR calls for significant upfront investment, before making the decision the key questions to ask is: will my DR site be capable of handling multiple contingencies and will it be able to transition itself to a secondary site without the users knowing it? That should be the end result of any successful DR Strategy.