Disaster Recovery Essay example

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Global Trends in Disaster Recovery

1. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a predetermined set of processes offered by a vendor to help an organisation implement a disaster recovery plan. DRaaS provides disaster recovery services in the Cloud. It can be provided as either a Private Cloud or a Public Cloud solution
DRaaS offers at least two* substantial advantages over in-house DRPs. If an enterprise lacks disaster recovery expertise among its personnel, a third-party team of DRP specialists can provision, configure, and test an effective plan.
In the event of an actual disaster, an offsite vendor will be less likely than the enterprise itself to suffer the direct and immediate effects of that disaster, allowing the outside entity to manage the DRP even in the event of the worst-case scenario: a total or near-total shutdown of the affected enterprise.
2. Cloud Services
As organizations use more internal and external cloud services, they're finding that these resources can become part of a disaster recovery strategy.
The cloud configuration allows helps to perform software upgrades across the multiple tenant systems quickly, easily and without disruptions.
Cloud-based DR has the potential to give companies lower costs yet faster recovery, with easier testing and more flexible contracts.
In a 2012 report from Forrester, the firm says cloud-based DR threatens to shake legacy approaches and offer a viable alternative to organizations that previously couldn't afford to implement disaster recovery or found it to be a burdensome task.
What the cloud has done for traditional disaster recovery service providers is make testing of their backup capabilities more flexible and less costly.
3. Virtualization
For many organizations, server virtualization has become a key component of the DR strategy, because it enables greater flexibility with computing resources.
"Virtualization has the potential to speed up the implementation of a disaster recovery strategy and the actual recovery in case of a disaster.
"It also has the ability to make disaster recovery more of an IT function rather than a corporate audit-type function. If you have the right policies and processes in place, [with virtualization] disaster recovery can become part of automatically deploying any server.
Virtualization enables companies to create an image of an entire data center that can be quickly activated—in part or in whole—when needed, at a relatively low cost.
On the whole, server virtualization has made DR a lot easier. Because virtual machines are much more portable than physical machines and they can be easily booted on disparate hardware, a lot of companies are using virtualization as a critical piece of their recovery efforts.
There are lots of offerings in the market that can perform tasks such as automating rapid virtual machine rebooting, replicating virtual machines at the hypervisor layer with heterogeneous storage, and turning backups of physical or virtual machines into bootable virtual machines, Dines says.
Ultimately, virtualization means companies can get a faster RTO [recovery time objective] for less money.
A potential negative is that virtualization might give organizations a false sense of security. "People may fail to plan properly for disaster recovery, assuming that everything will be handled by virtualization," Silverstone says. "There are certain machines that for various reasons are not likely to be virtualized, so using virtualization does not replace the need for proper disaster recovery planning and testing."
4. Mobile Devices in the Workforce
From a disaster recovery standpoint the growing use of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets
One of the positive impacts of the prevalence of mobile devices is that it gives people a greater ability to work remotely and communicate using their devices in an emergency.
But mobile device proliferation has also made disaster recovery slightly more complex, Dines