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Disaster recovery in software

Short answer

Disaster recovery is the set of policies and tools to restore services after a disaster with minimal data loss and downtime. Implement it by conducting risk assessment and defining RTO/RPO, performing regular off-site backups, using redundant hardware and a remote disaster recovery site, and testing the plan through drills.

What is disaster recovery in software? How could it be implemented at your organization?

Disaster recovery (DR) in software/IT is the set of policies, procedures and tools used to restore data, applications and services to normal operation after a disaster (fire, flood, earthquake, hardware failure, power loss, cyber attack, human error), with minimum data loss and downtime.

Implementation in an organisation

  1. Risk assessment and business impact analysis: identify the critical systems and set targets: RTO (recovery time objective, how quickly service must be restored) and RPO (recovery point objective, how much data loss is acceptable).
  2. Regular backups: full and incremental backups of data, configuration and software, stored off-site or in the cloud and encrypted; test restoring them.
  3. Redundancy: mirrored/replicated databases and servers, RAID, UPS and generator, dual network links.
  4. Disaster recovery site: a hot, warm or cold standby site (or cloud failover) in a different location. Kathmandu is earthquake-prone, so the site should be in another city.
  5. Written DR plan: roles, contact lists, step-by-step recovery procedures and the priority of systems.
  6. Testing and training: hold drills and update the plan periodically.
  7. Security and monitoring, version control of software, and quick re-deployment scripts.

✓ Answer checked by Claude Sonnet 5.5

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