Disaster Recovery Plan: key to operational continuity
Today we’re going to talk about a crucial aspect of Software Engineering that, unfortunately, many companies overlook. This negligence can represent a significant risk for the organization, with the potential to generate substantial financial losses and damage its reputation.
The DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) is a document that identifies and categorizes various potential risks and incidents that could affect a system, and defines the procedures to mitigate and recover from them. It is a fundamental piece to guarantee the operational continuity of a system, as it details step by step the actions to follow in case of an incident, facilitating data recovery and the restoration of functionalities, even in their most basic form.
This plan should be reviewed and tested at least once a year. However, in certain critical components of the system, testing may be more frequent, especially if they experience significant changes. This ensures that the plan stays updated and operational in case it needs to be implemented, thus reducing operational risks, improving the team’s response capacity, and minimizing downtime, which in turn minimizes financial losses and damage to the organization’s reputation.
Each potential incident identified in a DRP must include two key variables:
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): is the maximum acceptable data loss time in case of an incident. In other words, it defines how much data time can be lost without causing a significant impact on operations. For example, if our database performs a backup every hour, we have an RPO of 1 hour. This means that, in the worst case, we could lose up to one hour of data when restoring from the last available backup.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): is the maximum acceptable time to restore a service or system after an interruption.
Key points to consider in a DRP
- Provider unavailability (mainly cloud)
- Failure in a cloud region
- Database failure or unavailability
- Data processing failure or unavailability
- Data storage failure or unavailability
- Application errors or unavailability
- Communications failure or unavailability
- Temporary unavailability of the work team
- Data loss
- Recovery time
- Natural disasters
- Malware or other cyberattacks
- Power outage
Conclusion
Throughout my professional career, I have had the opportunity to prepare various DRP documents, participate in tests, and collaborate in external audit processes, which resulted in the certification of the systems I worked on. For me, it is a very rewarding process to know that the systems we help build are resilient to failures and minimize the impact on the organization’s operational continuity.
For this reason, I strongly recommend that organizations prepare and keep their DRPs updated. We never know when we will need them. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated in recent years that not all organizations were truly prepared.