How does DR differ from backup?

Having a solid disaster recovery plan is crucial to survival

A solid disaster recovery plan is absolutely essential to working in the cloud - even if you are the cloud, says Rajkumar Munusamy of Sungard Availability Services.

Disaster recovery is different from backup: rather than replicating your data to a secure location, DR allows you to get back up and operating quickly by replicating your entire system environment to a secondary site. A lot of companies don't do this, though; they simply store everything together in the cloud, but that relies on the stored data itself being clean.

Even cloud firms are guilty, operating under the perception of 'We don't need DR because we are the cloud'. If that were the case, then the recent AWS outage wouldn't have caused the problems that it did (Munusamy showed tweets from people who couldn't operate their TV, lights or even their front gate because of the outage).

It's not just malicious hacks that constitute a 'disaster'. When Toy Story 2 was being developed, Pixar lost 90 per cent of the film's data due to an employee inadvertently executing a Linux command - and then realising that its backups had been failing for a month. We hear similar stories every time there is a major ransomware outbreak. This is because "DR is always an afterthought. We develop and use applications assuming that nothing bad is going to happen..."Just because the team did not answer the question, ‘What if?'"

Ransomware and other threats lie undetected for almost 100 days on average, making replicated backups to on-prem hardware or the cloud useless. You must have an isolated environment in which to recover and cleanse data. This is part of the three steps that Sunguard recommends for recovery. First: protect data (tiering applications to determine the most critical will help); second: have a computer platform (a secure recovery space - this is where most companies fail); and third: manage your recovery by determining who does what in a disaster.

Munusamy emphasised the last point many times. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and as humans we tend to run around and flap our arms in a time of crisis. Do not let this happen. Plan for every scenario and keep testing.