Plan Your Disaster Recovery Strategy

Disasters can knock critical systems offline, damage offices and data centers, or render databases and applications needed to run business operations temporarily unusable. A disaster recovery plan is a business's process and technology roadmap for getting its most important systems and applications back up quickly to resume work while restoring others.

Disaster recovery (DR) encompasses a business’s technical plans for getting its computing workloads back online after a disruptive event, as well as the methods for testing the playbook before disaster strikes. In a disaster recovery plan, workloads are ranked in order of importance. Aim to minimize computing downtime and lost data while balancing the cost of doing so for each workload.

Disaster recovery describes the policies, technologies, and budget that businesses devote to bringing important IT systems back online after unexpected downtime. Before a disruption occurs, identify which mission-critical applications must be restored immediately after a disaster, and rank others in groups of importance.

There are two critical disaster recovery metrics: recovery time objective (RTO), which measures the maximum amount of time a system can remain offline, and recovery point objective (RPO), which measures how much data a business can afford to lose and is associated with the frequency of backups or replication. For both, shorter thresholds are better but costlier. IT organizations often set an RTO and RPO for each system they run, allowing them to balance costs with criticality.

Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan

Cloud Architect, Cloud Operations Manager, Security Architect

Thoroughly assess the potential risks of catastrophic events, the potential damage to operations, how employees and external stakeholders may be affected, and the financial losses or regulatory fines that could be incurred as a result in your DR plan.

As part of developing a DR plan, identify executive sponsors and affected teams; catalog physical and IT assets that could be harmed during a disaster; and consider the potential impacts on customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Decide which workloads can be restored from backups, which require live data combined with services running at lower capacity, and which workloads need full capacity. In some cases, active systems that are down will automatically switch over to standby systems, incurring minimal downtime and zero data loss. In other cases, the switchover will be manual. Select backup sites and craft a plan that lets them quickly restart applications. The cloud is a big help here. Look for IT dependencies that could impede restarting operations—cases where one offline application prevents bringing another back online.

In addition to these technical aspects, executive leadership and lines of business should have emergency communication and response plans in place as well as provisions for training employees on the DR plan, testing and rehearsing it via tabletop testing or walk-throughs, and continuously improving it.

Design Disaster Recovery Solutions

Cloud Architect, Cloud Operations Manager, Security Architect

When developing a disaster recovery plan, start with a risk assessment of potential catastrophic events and their impact on IT systems and business processes.

Then IT and line-of-business teams, supported by management, should rank assets and systems by their importance and assign DR strategies to protect each, considering the desired RTOs and RPOs and the available budget. DR plans are part of broader business continuity plans for bridging the time from a disaster, cyberattack, or outage caused by a technical error to recovery. They need to be continually tested and updated.

Plan for traditional disaster recovery, or cloud-based disaster reocvery. Traditional DR relies on redundant servers and storage devices located in a company-owned data center or backing up business data and application instances to remote data centers so a problem in one geographic area is unlikely to cause damage to remote copies far away. Cloud-based DR strategies, by contrast, let businesses save on up-front costs by storing smaller or standby copies of application instances in a public cloud, scaling them up by adding computing resources when they need to be activated in an emergency. Businesses can also distribute mission-critical applications across multiple cloud regions.

Implement Full Stack Disaster Recovery

Cloud Architect, Cloud Operations Manager, Security Architect

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Full Stack Disaster Recovery is a disaster recovery orchestration and management service that provides comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities for all layers of an application stack, including infrastructure, middleware, database, and application.

OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery (DR) ensures comprehensive business continuity from a variety of data center outages to ensure that organizations have a minimal impact from region-wide outages or availability domain outages.

Full Stack DR is flexible enough to easily integrate with various Oracle platforms, non-Oracle applications, and infrastructure. Full Stack DR generates, runs, and monitors disaster recovery plans for services and applications deployed in your tenancy. Full Stack DR operates at the service level, so there is no impact on other services running in your tenancy. Based on your specific needs, you can customize the disaster recovery plans generated by Full Stack DR.

Actively monitor the progress of Full Stack DR operations and take corrective actions if there are errors during an operation. Validate and monitor business continuity readiness and compliance by periodically running Full Stack DR Prechecks.

Full Stack DR is supported OCI to OCI. Any on-premises workloads will need to be migrated to OCI before Full Stack DR can be implemented.

Disaster Recovery Drill Plans enable you to exercise and validate your business continuity configuration and plans without disrupting your production stack. Bring a copy of the production stack in isolation in a standby region for testing and validation.