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Running head: DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN

DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN 10

A disaster can be defined as unexpected disruptions that are serious and occur over short or long period of time thus causing a lot of humans, economic and material losses (Song, 2017). In the information technology sector, disaster is defined as sudden attacks in a computer system or network that leads to loss of data, information or even damages the system components or network (Mohamed, 2014). Disaster has become one of the biggest concerns in most of the companies and organizations as well. This is because; there are different kinds of disasters such as hybrid and natural disasters. For this reason, many companies have developed disaster recovery plans. These plans are therefore very useful in helping the companies to regain access and functionality to the company’s information technology infrastructure even after disaster events such as cyber-attack (Wicker, 2020).

Disaster recovery plan ensures that a company responds to any disaster or even an emergency that causes information system disruptions. The main objective of disaster recovery plan is minimizing effects on different company operations (Zhang, 2017). Companies have developed different types of disaster recovery plans depending on the information technology infrastructure which is mostly exposed to unplanned interruption. This paper will focus its discussion on a complete disaster recovery plan that will be submitted to the executive board of our company.

Like the other companies which rely more on technology and also electronic data, our company also rely on technology for our daily operations. So far, our company has lost a lot of revenues and has also incurred a lot of expenses yearly as a result of different disasters. As a result of these unplanned and unprepared interruptions, the company has decided to come up with a disaster recovery plan. The disaster recovery plan will involve a set of rules and policies, tools and also procedures that will help in enabling recovery of the lost or damaged components following any kind of a disaster. This disaster recovery plan will help in replicating data in off- premises location which cannot be affected by disasters (Alwan, 2018). For example; when our company’s server goes down as a result of natural disasters or cyber-attack, we need to recover all the lost data from a second location that the data is backed up.

Some of the disasters that our company will plan for include: national disaster, communication failure, applications failure, data center disasters, and also building disaster among others. In determining the best disaster recovery plan, our company management will consider issues such as data, technology used, resources such as people, budget, and also the position of the management on risks and threats. The company’s management approval on the disaster recovery plans is very important. For this reason, all the recovery plans to be developed should align with the company’s goals and objectives (Xiao, 2017). Once a disaster recovery strategy has been developed and approved, the management can translate it into a disaster recovery plan.

Prior developing the disaster recovery plan which will be used, the company management should first identify all the critical operations in company, should also carry out disaster scenarios evaluation, then create communication plan that is effective, they should also develop a data backup and finally test the effectiveness of the plan. Identifying critical operations will help the company to know which operations are most effective and those operations that their interruptions will have a lot of impacts in the company operations. Identification is carried on based on services offered and products provided to customers.

In evaluating disaster scenarios the company management is supposed to work with the involved departments so as to determine the most useful priorities, timeline required and recovery objectives and goals (Acosta, 2020). Creating an effective communication plan will help the company management to assign all the articulated roles to specific employees and also departments. Developing a strong and reliable data backup and recovery plan will help in including strong solutions while fixing any disaster problem. It also helps in developing instructions that will help in monitoring any other intrusion. Testing the plan developed ensures that there are no gaps which have been left in the plan thus increasing its efficiency.

Before our company management develops a disaster recovery plan, it will also analyze all the available and existing assets and also priorities. During this step, risk analysis is very important as it helps in evaluating all the potential risks that the company might face and also the outcomes of those risks. The individuals who will carry out risk analysis should therefore identify all the potential hazards, determine who or what these hazards will harm, and also create all the necessary procedures that will help in preventing these risks ( Nordin, 2018).

The second step is carrying out business impact analysis. These step help in evaluating all the effects of the identified risks to the business operations. It is very important for the management of the company to carry out this analysis so as to predict and quantify all the incurred costs, and also it helps in examining the impact of different disasters on the company’s safety, legal compliance and marketing. The third aspect that the management of our company should focus on is recovery point objective.

Recovery point objective is described as the maximum time that the company must recover a file from backup storage so that normal operations in the company can resume after disasters (Song, 2017). It is a very important aspect as it determines the minimum backup frequency. The forth aspect is recovery time objective. It is described as the amount of time that the company estimates its systems can go off without cause any significant or serious damage to the company. The management of our company should consider all those aspects as they play an important role in making decisions on the best disaster recovery plan.

The main aim for our company to develop a disaster recovery plan is to help us in reducing all the potential damages that any kind of a disaster might cause and also to help us in restoring operations quickly when a disaster occurs. The disaster recovery plan will also be used in establishing alternative means of operations in advance before unplanned disruptions happen. Research has shown that some companies use different external disaster recovery plans and business continuity consulting services when addressing company’s requirements for assessments, plans and also designs.

The first disaster recovery plan that our company will develop virtualized disaster recovery plan. This is a very important type of disaster recovery that involves replication and it helps in allowing users to fail over to workloads that are virtualized (Nordin, 2018). In this plan, our company will copy all the virtual machines workloads off-site regularly. By doing so, data and systems will be protected from floods, earthquakes, fires and other natural emergencies. This plan is very crucial as it helps in providing flexibility during disaster recovery. This disaster recovery plan is easy to use, it is efficient, and it is quickly.

Research has shown that, any platform that is virtualized provides high availability in the event of failure as compared to those which are not virtualized (Joe, 2019).

This plan will play a vital role in our company as it will help us meet recovery time objective as well as recovery point objectives. This will be achieved as a result of carrying out frequent replication especially in critical systems. When developing this type of a disaster recovery plan, the company should identify all its important virtual machines, ensure that its backup and recovery strategies are ready, test this process completely, and also ensure that all the significant tasks are automated.

Data protection, virtualized vendor support, and also virtualized management platforms that are integrated should be available when developing this plan. The company will use the following method in this particular plan. The first method is backing up data within a virtual machine (Zhang, 2017). In this method, the backup is done when a third party is being run in a virtual machine within the same procedure and also configuration. The second method is VMware ESX Server service console. In this method, the involved agents will run in the service console (Alwan, 2018). It is a very critical method as it provides the full system image. The third method is VM ware consolidated backup. This method is useful in reducing the backup traffic in all the local area networks. Virtualized disaster recovery plan will therefore plan an important role in our company as it will help in providing opportunities to implement other disaster recovery plans in a more reliable, efficient and simpler way.

The second disaster recovery plan that will be developed in our company is network disaster recovery plan. This type of a plan includes different sets of procedures, instructions and policies that are designed to prepare the company to respond quickly to a disrupted network service in case of a natural or man -made disaster (Wicker, 2020). In most cases, data, internet access and also voice share the same network resources. For this reason therefore; network disaster recovery plan will help in ensuring that all the involved resources and services that are found to rely on network have been backed up. It also ensures that these resources are running smoothly even in the event of interruptions.

This plan includes all the necessary procedures that are used in recovering local area networks of the company, wireless networks and also wide area networks. It will also cover all the network applications, services, servers, information, data and also computer components.

This type of a disaster recovery plan will play a vital role in our company as it will ensure that there are no interrupted internal and external communications. It will also ensure that network infrastructures are not disrupted by flood, earthquake, carrier issues, cyber security incidents and also hurricane. In preparing network disaster recovery plan, the company management should use continuity standards of the company, should also identify all the necessary recovery objectives, it should also ensure that it sticks to the basics, should also ensure that the plan is tested and updated regularly, and finally it should stay flexible (Xiao, 2017). The management of the company should also include all important emergency contacts as well as actions to be taken. This is very essential as network disaster recovery plan will be used in identifying specific issues or threats that are related to the company’s network operations.

The third disaster recovery plan is cloud disaster recovery plan. This plan is described as combined strategies and services that are useful in backing up data, information, applications and other useful resources to public cloud. Research has shown that, when any kind of a disaster occurs, the affected resources or data can be retrieved back to normal in the local data center (Zhang, 2017). When developing cloud disaster recovery plan, the company should first understand its infrastructure and highlight any other risks, it should also carry out a business impact analysis, then create a disaster recovery plan that is based on recovery point objective and recovery time objective, then approach the best cloud provider, and also build its cloud disaster recovery infrastructure.

All this should be carried out because the aim of this plan is allowing storage and recovery of all the system data on a cloud-based platform that is remote. The reason for choosing this type of a plan is because it is much faster compared to on-premises disaster recovery plan, it is also less complex thus making it easier to carry out testing of the disaster recovery services. On the other hand, the presence of different cloud providers plays a vital role in reducing the workload from the company as the operational burden is mostly outsourced. Using this type of plan in our company will allow all the company’s processes to be more flexible. It is therefore very important even though it require proper management.

In selecting the best cloud disaster recovery provider, the management should therefore consider aspects such as compliance, location, reliability, security, and also scalability.

In location aspect, the management should consider the physical distance of the disaster recovery provider and latency. This is because; when disaster recovery components are put too close, it will increase the risks of shared physical disaster.

On the other hand, putting the disaster recovery components too far away is known to increase latency and also network congestion thus making it so hard for the management to access disaster recovery content (Acosta, 2020). On the scalability aspect, this plan should be able to protect all the selected data. This plan should also address all security concerns which are the common issues in the cloud. For this reason, the management should understand all the security requirements of the cloud disaster recovery and make sure that the cloud provider offers authentication, encryption and also virtual private networks which are required in safeguarding the company’s valuable resources.

Cloud disaster recovery plan will be made up of three fundamental approaches. The first approach is cold disaster recovery. This recovery is made up of data storage. It is the simplest approach even though it takes a long time to recover thus leaving the company with the longest downtime in an event of a disaster. Warm disaster recovery is the second approach. This approach deals with duplication of data and applications which are placed with a cloud disaster recovery provider (Nordin, 2018). This data is then kept up to date in the data center that is primary. Warm disaster recovery is very important as it can be bought online when a company wants to resume operations from the disaster recovery provider. Hot disaster recovery is the third approach. This approach deals with deploying a live parallel of data and workloads that are running together in tandem. It is a very essential approach as it helps in any kind of a disaster. For example; when a disaster strike one site, the other remaining sites continue without interruption to handle the work in progress. Our company will make use of these three approaches so as to avoid downtime and also enhance flexibility.

The other disaster recovery plan that the company will implement is data center disaster recovery plan. This plan is made up of all the best practices that are used in setting up a good discovery plan. It is therefore very important for the management to identify all the individuals who will be involved in the planning process.

Data center disaster recovery plan also focus on data center facilities and also their infrastructures such as power sources, environment systems and also security. In developing data center disaster recovery plan, the management should carry out an operational risk assessment. This assessment helps in analyzing all the key operating components such as critical systems. The management of the company should therefore coordinate with information technology management while carry out risk assessment.

The next thing that the management should do is gathering all the relevant infrastructure documents such as utility diagrams and also network diagrams among others. Then it should also all the other information technology disaster plans that are already available in the company. After gathering, it should go ahead and compile all the results from all the risk assessments and compile them into gap analysis. The company management should also carry out a review on the report and agree on the best recommended actions. Then the management should prepare the best and reliable data center disaster recovery plan which will help in addressing critical assets such as hardware and software. Then the management should go ahead and conduct all the necessary tests of the plans and systems recovery assets so that they can validate the operations of the implemented plans. Finally, the management should make sure that it updates all the available data center disaster recovery plan checklists so that they can reflect any needed change.

This data center disaster recovery plan will play a very important role in our company as it will help in protecting a significant investment in the company. When building this disaster recovery plan, it is very necessary for the management to remember that it is protecting a significant investment in the information technology and communications sector. The plan should therefore be flexible and scalable so that it can address a wide range of disrupted scenarios.

From the above discussion, we learn that disaster recovery plans are very essential in most of the companies as they helps in resuming tasks quickly during or after a disaster. They also play a vital role in making sure that it reduces interruptions after a natural or man-made disaster. All the above discussed disaster recovery plans are used in the company to sure that it responds to any kind of a disaster or any other type of an emergency that affects information systems.

All this information shows that it is very important for any organization or company to implement disaster recovery plans even before any disaster occurs. I therefore conclude that disaster recovery plans should be set in all companies and organizations.

Reference

Lozupone, V. (2017). Disaster recovery plan for medical records company. International Journal of Information Management, 37(6), 622-626.

Alshammari, M. M., Alwan, A. A., Nordin, A., & Abualkishik, A. Z. (2018). Disaster recovery with minimum replica plan for reliability checking in multi-cloud. Procedia computer science, 130, 247-254.

Song, Y., Li, C., Olshansky, R., Zhang, Y., & Xiao, Y. (2017). Are we planning for sustainable disaster recovery? Evaluating recovery plans after the Wenchuan earthquake. Journal of environmental planning and management, 60(12), 2192-2216.

Finucane, M. L., Acosta, J., Wicker, A., & Whipkey, K. (2020). Short-term solutions to a long-term challenge: rethinking disaster recovery planning to reduce vulnerabilities and inequities. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(2), 482.

https://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/definition/disaster-recovery?amp=1

Meilani, D., Arief, I., & Habibitullah, M. (2019, December). Designing disaster recovery plan of data system for university. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 697, No. 1, p. 012028). IOP Publishing.