Modern Data Protection

Chapter 11. Disaster Recovery Methods

Having a good backup and recovery system is important, and no one would argue with that. But for many years, the typical disaster recovery (DR) plan of most organizations consisted of a box of tapes at an off-site vaulting vendor. That never was an actual plan, as I’ll cover in this chapter, but it’s becoming less and less acceptable in IT circles to admit that is your idea of a DR plan. Having a solid DR plan that can recover your organization very quickly has become much more important recently, for reasons I cover in this chapter. Let’s take a look at those reasons.

Disaster Recovery Becomes Paramount

DR has never been an option for most organizations; it’s always been a requirement. But you’d never know it in many places. Data protection in general is rarely the first project that anyone talks about. Everyone knows the backup system is outdated and outclassed, but they also know that making the backup system better is rarely a competitive advantage. Data protection projects are often pushed further and further down the budget spreadsheet until they eventually pop off.

If data protection is last on the budget spreadsheet, disaster recovery is often the last line item under data protection. This has always been the case. Yes, we knew we had to have backups, and we knew that we should store some of them off-site. But push came to shove, and suddenly the DR plan is a box of tapes in somebody’s trunk; we can’t even afford an Iron Mountain ...