When it comes to IT disasters, it’s not a case of “will it happen?”, it’s only a matter of when. Whether it's the result of external threats or internal failures, there’ll be a day when you need to take immediate action to ensure business continuity. Having a disaster recovery team in place is crucial for the success of the recovery process. This specialized team prepares and implements a strategic plan to quickly restore operations and minimize disruption, safeguarding the organization's resilience in the face of unforeseen challenges.
A well-tested and thought-out IT disaster recovery (DR) plan ensures your business can handle large-scale disruptions efficiently. If a disaster occurs and your organization isn’t prepared for a loss of service, it may have serious repercussions, including data loss, customer dissatisfaction, or potential fines.
That’s why it’s important that your organization takes steps to make its IT disaster recovery procedure as effective as possible. In this article, we’ll cover the types of IT disasters that businesses could face, the potential impact of these disasters, and IT disaster recovery roles and responsibilities.
What disaster recovery means and why it’s important
IT disaster recovery is the process of recovering and restoring operations to a business’s crucial infrastructure and systems when it's challenged by an unexpected internal or external threat. This usually involves transferring all operations from the primary data center to the secondary data center, while a specialist team works to get systems back up and running.
Disaster recovery matters to your business and your customers; a dedicated disaster recovery team will develop a DR plan to ensure a seamless process. Here are a few reasons why having a comprehensive DR plan is important when faced with a crisis:
- Maintains customer retention: If customers are unable to access your services in the event of a disaster, they may question your organization’s reliability and security, especially if it impacts the business for a prolonged period. On the other hand, if your company can continue providing its services while a crisis is taking place, customers will feel confident in your systems and practices, therefore enhancing their trust and loyalty toward your company.
- Prevents financial loss: A technology disaster can directly lead to income loss and decrease productivity if an established IT DR strategy isn’t in place. You can prevent losing revenue unnecessarily by implementing a robust, well-tested recovery plan that returns systems to standard operations quickly. Taking prompt action to fix the issue also helps to reduce recovery costs: If your recovery time actual (RTA) aligns with your recovery time objective (RTO), then you have utilized your resources to reach optimized efficiency.
- Reduces the impacts of cyber attacks: Having an effective, tailored cyber recovery plan is more crucial than ever as threats increase. Have plans in place to perform a bare metal recovery and recover data from the last good known source so you can ensure that you have eradicated the malware from your systems.
How are businesses impacted by disasters?
Before delving deeper into the roles and responsibilities of a disaster recovery team, it is crucial to understand how businesses are impacted by disasters. An IT disaster could result in a slowdown, interruption, or total outage in an IT system, leading to loss of service. The main IT disasters organizations encounter include:
- Failing hardware: Technological failures can result in downtime and loss of data. The impact of failing technology depends on the size and complexity of a system, as well as the speed at which it’s handled.
- Software bugs: Even seemingly small software bugs can have huge knock-on effects for the business and customers. Just look at the recent Crowdstrike outage as an example!
- Cyber attacks: Malicious, unauthorized access by third parties can cause data breaches, identity theft, and other forms of fraud. This can severely impact a company if it doesn't have effective cyber recovery measures in place.
- Human error: Mistakes are easily made, but not so easily fixed. Human error, such as mistakes in data entry, communication, or operations, can have sizable consequences and lead to potential disaster.
The essential elements of a disaster recovery plan
- Communication and transparency are key to making the disaster recovery process run smoothly
- Keep interference to a minimum - let your technology teams do what they’re good at
- Know your RTOs and use a recovery platform that allows you to monitor how your progress is measuring against the target
- Remember that critical applications and services get first priority
- Have the ability to automate manual, repetitive tasks and orchestrate what is done when and by whom
Find out more about what is an IT disaster recovery plan and what’s included.
What do IT disaster recovery teams take care of?
IT DR teams handle the development, documentation, and execution of a disaster recovery plan. They are responsible for getting organizations back on their feet in the event of a crisis or system failure. When a situation arises, a disaster recovery team should handle the following components:
- Developing and maintaining a disaster recovery plan (DRP)
- Regularly testing and updating the DRO
- Data backup and recovery
- Crisis and recovery communications
- Reporting status to stakeholders
- Creating audit reports for compliance and regulators
- DR process improvements
The roles and responsibilities of a disaster recovery team
These are the core IT disaster recovery team roles and responsibilities:
CIO and CTO
Executive management, namely the CIO and CTO, play a crucial role in the IT disaster recovery team. They need to be aware of the processes for oversight and approval purposes and to see how the recovery is progressing in real time. Executives need to approve DR strategy, policy, budgets, and obstacle management plans.
Heads of Problem, Incident, Change and Service Management
Under the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, problem, incident and change are three of the core IT disaster recovery processes - there will often be a lead covering all three and a lower level lead for each area. Within the IT disaster recovery team, these roles are responsible for IT DR processes and how those processes are consumed within the organization. They are responsible for the command center and ensure an organization’s technology infrastructure runs efficiently.
Heads of Infrastructure and Operations, IT Services, TechOps, Global Service Delivery, Product Management, Production Services and Operations Technology
These IT disaster recovery roles usually report to the CIO and their team consists of technology subject matter experts. They are responsible for the provision of technology services and applications to the business and in charge of deployment sites, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid.
Preparedness and recovery
Before you can execute an effective disaster recovery plan, you need to know your organization thoroughly. First, confirm the technology services and infrastructure that underpin the services you provide to customers and rate them in tiers from critical to non-critical. To ensure success, you need to have a competent disaster recovery team in place.
Take a frank look at gaps in your current ability to handle a crisis and consider different IT disaster recovery scenarios you might face. This includes determining which repetitive tasks can and should be automated to increase your level of maturity and efficiency. Examine the risk versus reward of testing your plan, make sure every person involved in your plan embraces it, and create a plan that everyone sees and understands. Understand when to be flexible in your plan (and when not to be).
Determine when and how often you need to test your IT DR plans and make your tests as real as possible. Make enough time for testing, be mindful of accuracy, and involve stakeholders at all levels of the test activity to more accurately replicate what would happen in an actual incident. Most importantly, practice how you play to get realistic results.
Challenges and solutions for IT disaster recovery teams
IT disaster recovery teams face many challenges:
- Time-consuming and ineffective testing: Testing preparation takes a lot of time and resources and does not accurately reflect how teams have to behave in a real incident, which are never planned.
- Lack of confidence in the ability to recover in a timely manner from a major incident: Outside of the planning window, organizations are not confident in their ability to recover and tests don’t expose real risks or vulnerabilities that need to be found. Mobilizing and coordinating teams and between siloes delays response times.
- Setting and meeting RTOs: Determining appropriate RTOs for each service can be challenging, especially when testing does not reflect the reality of a recovery. Regulators expect fast turnarounds for recovery, especially for customer-facing services, but it is not always easy to track or know if you are on track during a recovery.
- Regulatory compliance: Tracking if all activities have been completed correctly during a recovery is challenging as the focus in the moment is not on documentation or tracking - making regulatory reporting tough.
- Disjointed processes and risk of human error: Many organizations still rely on manually-intensive, disjointed processes to run their IT disaster recovery and don’t take advantage of automation for repetitive tasks. 40% of organizations don’t use any automation for disaster recovery and 24% don’t have their plans in an executable format, leading to longer recovery times and a higher risk of errors.
The Cutover platform enables IT disaster recovery teams to solve these challenges in the following ways:
- Define, store, and regularly update recovery plans: Codify recovery plans in dynamic, executable runbooks that are stored in a central place and can be regularly tested, reviewed and improved. Plan efficiently for failures with standardized rehearsals and tests to recover 20% faster.
- Coordinate and communicate seamlessly: Executable runbooks and in-built communications make mobilizing during an event faster and everyone knows their role and the actions they need to take and when.
- Move to unannounced testing: Having plans stored in runbooks reduced the preparation time needed ahead of testing making it possible to perform more realistic, unannounced tests.
- Measure RTOs against RTAs: Import RTOs from BCM/ITSM platform. Automatically calculate and track your RTAs during rehearsal and actual recoveries. Dashboards show how recovery is progressing in relation to planned timelines.
- Post-event analytics for continuous improvement and regulatory reporting: Create a governance framework with visibility into real-time analytics and reduce audit preparation time by 60%. Cutover automatically creates an indelible audit trail, recording every action taken in the platform, making regulatory reporting on the response to an outage simple and providing plenty of data to be used for continuous improvement.
- Optimize disaster recovery with automation: Integrate Cutover with all the other tools involved in recovery including ITSM and BCM tooling, ensuring that you’re always working from a golden source of data. Communicate via your existing channels e.g. Slack/MS Teams/Zoom from directly within the platform for seamless communications. Execute tests and recovery processes with automation, reducing execution time by 50%.
The importance of IT disaster recovery teams
With all the challenges and threats facing organizations today, it’s clear that IT disaster recovery teams are vitally important, and need all the help they can get to ensure swift and effective recovery from IT disasters.
Cutover can help your IT DR team!
Cutover’s Collaborative Automation SaaS platform is an IT disaster recovery solution that enables IT disaster recovery teams to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility. Cutover’s automated runbooks connect teams, technology, and systems, increasing efficiency and reducing risk in IT disaster, cloud and cyber recovery. Cutover is trusted by world-leading institutions, including the three largest US banks and three of the world’s five largest investment banks.