Managing Database Backups and Disaster Recovery Plan

Backup and Disaster Recovery is the act of creating and updating multiple copies of data regularly and keeping them in another one or more remote locations, and then utilizing the saved copies of data to carry out or continue company activities in the case of data loss caused by disasters, such as a damaged file, data corruption, cyberattacks, or natural disasters. The process of creating copies of data is what we refer to as backup. At the same time, disaster recovery is the strategy and procedures used to immediately restore access to the company’s data following a data loss caused by a system disruption. This strategy may include transferring to other alternative servers and storage devices until the primary data center can be restored. Simply having data backups is not enough to restore the business operation. That is why having a backup and disaster recovery plan is extremely important to keep the company running.

Establishing a backup and disaster recovery plan is extremely important. In case of a data loss, the data needs to be recovered from the backup. If the company is prepared, the recovery process alone could range from several hours to several days. In the time it takes to recover the lost data, the company cannot continue its business operation that needs the lost data. This will bring the company harm and tremendous loss in profit. That is why companies must invest in establishing and managing a backup and disaster recovery plan.

There are a few things that need to be considered before creating a backup and disaster recovery plan:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO refers to the amount of time it takes to fully restore regular business activities after the event of a disaster. When determining the RTO, we need to evaluate how much time loss is acceptable to the company and what effect that loss of time will have on your bottom line. RTOs vary from every other business; some could find losing a specific system needed in a business operation for several days acceptable, while some need help to afford a downtime of 5 minutes.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): RPO refers to the quantity of data acceptable to lose during a disaster. The RPO decides how much data loss is acceptable to the company; if the company decides that it cannot afford to lose any data at all, then a backup needs to be done constantly to ensure that no data is lost. If the company can afford to lose a few minutes or several hours of data, they will set up the data backup time to match the RPO.
• The company can then assign RTOs and RPOs to every operation in their business process. The RTOs and RPOs assigned to each operation are varied based on their significance and importance. The more critical the operation, the less RTO and RPO are allowed. Classifying each operation, such as Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3, can assist in offering a structure for the disaster recovery strategy. The following phase in developing a disaster recovery strategy is considering deployment possibilities. There are various deployment possibilities, including cloud, on-premises, traditional tape, snapshot-based replication, and continuous replication. The company needs to decide from the deployment possibilities mentioned above, which will the company benefit the most from.

The various deployment possibilities are as mentioned:

• Cloud: Most cloud-based systems offer data storage infrastructure and tools for managing backup and disaster recovery operations. Substantial financial investment for infrastructure and environmental monitoring costs can be avoided by choosing a cloud-based backup or disaster recovery option. Cloud backup and disaster recovery systems support both on-premises and cloud-based operational environments. For example, you may store backed-up or duplicated data on the cloud while retaining the operational systems in your own data center.
• On-premises: Storing some backup or disaster recovery operations might help you retrieve data and restore IT services more quickly. A disaster recovery strategy based entirely on an on-site infrastructure would require more work. Ideally, it is more effective if the disaster recovery plans include an alternative location away from the original data center. This is to prevent the system’s complete failure and complete data loss caused by some unforeseen disaster.
• Traditional Tape: Traditional tape can be used to store a massive amount of data dependably and cost-effectively. Tape is useful for backup but less for disaster recovery, as it demands the quicker access speed of disk-based storage.
• Snapshot-based replication: snapshot-based replication works similarly to how taking a photo/screenshot works; it replicates an application’s or disk’s present state at a specific time. This approach can help secure data while saving storage capacity by storing data that has changed since the last snapshot. Backup and disaster recovery can both benefit from snapshot-based replication. There is also a risk related to this backup method, as it only saves data based on the most recent snapshot; data loss could happen quite quickly if an outage happened.
• Continuous replication: Continuous replication is starting to be used by many companies for their disaster recovery and backup plans. This approach continually replicates the most recent copy of a disk or program to another location or the cloud, decreasing downtime and offering more precise data restoration.