With IT service outages increasing each year, it’s critical to have a comprehensive, well-defined, and automated disaster recovery (DR) plan for your IT applications. Automated DR plans increase efficiency and reduce potential errors enabling you to recover faster and at scale.
This article overviews the importance of automated disaster recovery plans for IT applications, the power of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) for disaster recovery, and disaster recovery plan solutions.
The importance of disaster recovery for IT applications
How useful is an application if you can’t access it? Imagine a mission-critical application goes down. Whether it’s a payment app for a bank or a retailer’s e-commerce site, both scenarios would have a detrimental impact on revenue, brand reputation, customer satisfaction, and more.
This is where an IT disaster recovery strategy comes into play. The DR strategy is a necessary requirement for all IT applications - outlining the processes, teams, technology tools, and communication required for restoration and recovery. Application disaster recovery plays a crucial role in this, ensuring that essential software and services can be quickly restored to minimize downtime and disruption.
Disaster recovery plan for IT applications: essential for resilience
Disaster recovery and resilience have a close relationship. Resilience is the broader, proactive approach to ensuring business operations can function during and after a disruption. This includes risk identification, prevention, and the design and architecture of systems. IT disaster recovery focuses on the strategy and process to recover applications and restore business operations to normal after a disruption or disaster event. But, what is a disaster recovery plan? An IT disaster recovery plan includes the step-by-step procedure to restore access to IT applications in the event of a disaster event (outage, cyber attack, natural disaster, etc.), and is a critical component to ensure resilience. The plan also includes prioritization of applications during a disaster recovery.
Risks of not having a disaster recovery plan for IT applications
Not having a disaster recovery plan for IT applications is risky business. If an outage or disaster event strikes, you could inevitably delay downtime with detrimental impacts on revenue, customers, and the overall business. However, even if you have an IT DR plan created, it’s not a one and done type of situation. It’s equally important to review and update the disaster recovery plan regularly, at minimum once per year.
Automation: Maturing your posture of disaster recovery for IT applications
The age of automation for IT disaster recovery is here. In Cutover’s recent IT disaster recovery survey, enterprises stated they need to increase investment in IT DR automation and noted the benefits.
Benefits of automating disaster recovery application processes
With IT automation comes increased productivity and efficiency for staff. Our survey shows that businesses also perceive increased profitability and a reduction in recovery costs as top benefits of incorporating automation into IT DR processes.
Automating DR provides benefits which include:
- Removing manual, repetitive tasks to improve process efficiency and staff productivity
- Improving the frequency and quality of communication with automated notifications
- Accelerating and scaling application failovers (ex. Disaster recovery for multiple SaaS applications one at a time or kick-off recovery for 10 apps at once)
- Meeting regulatory compliance procedures, such as the DORA regulation, with automated reporting and audit logs
IT disaster recovery automation tools
Technology tools help streamline workflows, improve efficiency and reduce errors by automating repetitive, manual tasks. While it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, many enterprises use one or multiple tools within the technology recovery stack:
- Information technology service management (ITSM) - acts as the golden source of IT system configuration, providing governance.
- Application performance monitoring platform (APM) - provides critical real time data of application performance to understand resource usage, response times, etc.
- Infrastructure as code platform (IaC) - scripting tools to accelerate provisioning new infrastructure and applications.
- Monitoring tools - actively monitors the IT application estate to enable recovery activities to take place ahead of a failure.
- Communication platform - notify and message key stakeholders via phone, SMS, email, etc. to keep teams informed of recovery progress and status updates.
- Orchestration and runbook automation tools - acts as the system of execution during a recovery with automated runbooks listing all manual and automated tasks, in sequence.
The future: AI enhances disaster recovery for IT applications
AI can further amplify the benefits of automation for IT disaster recovery. Both AI and machine learning (ML) are expected to have a big impact on application-based disaster recovery in the next two to three years. In Cutover’s 2024 survey, over two-thirds of enterprises believe that AI will transform both the design and execution of disaster recovery plans.
Create disaster recovery templates, plans, or runbooks from data sources
It’s not surprising that in Cutover’s recent survey, enterprises think AI and ML can help in the creation of templates, plans, or runbooks for DR.
For complex IT application disaster recoveries that involve thousands of tasks and dependencies, it can take hours, days, or even weeks to create an accurate runbook. Leveraging AI for template or runbook creation has the potential to significantly reduce DR planning, and advancerecovery execution.
Analyze DR plan in progress to suggest alternative options
By incorporating AI suggestions into your IT disaster recovery plan or runbook, you can get ahead of potential bottlenecks during a live recovery or test scenario. In an automated runbook, examples of suggested improvements include:
- Assign specific people to tasks
- Add estimated durations or timelines for each task
- Include checkpoints or validation steps throughout the runbook or plan
- Expand the communication tasks
- Consolidate similar tasks
- Improve task descriptions
- Identify opportunities to automate response actions
Analyze DR post event metrics to suggest improvements to the plan
Another key benefit of AI is to suggest intelligent improvements by analyzing the completed DR plan. Even the most comprehensive DR plan or runbook can be enhanced with improvements around dependencies, workstreams, redundant tasks, and more. After a live recovery or testing scenario, incorporating AI into your post-mortem or debrief session will take your lessons learned to the next level.
Summarize DR runbook descriptions to save time
AI can also help create disaster recovery plan runbook summaries - saving teams immense amount of time. Runbook summaries provide key information and a concise overview of the purpose of the runbook. Often, they are used to inform stakeholders and keep teams aligned. When managing multiple runbooks with hundreds or thousands of tasks, runbook summaries can be very time consuming and prone to errors. AI can provide a swift solution!
How Cutover’s automated runbooks streamline disaster recovery for IT applications
Cutover’s SaaS platform can be used to streamline and accelerate disaster recovery for critical applications and other IT operations processes including cloud migration, and application release automation.
Avoid common mistakes in making a disaster recovery plan for IT applications, use Cutover’s automated runbooks and book a demo today.