Disaster Recovery: A Development Necessity

2 min readJan 31, 2024

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) refers to the process, policies, and procedures to recover or continue IT infrastructure and business operations after a natural or human-induced disaster. It is a set of activities or plans that helps organizations resume normal operations after a disruptive event or disaster.

The process involves assessing business risks, identifying critical systems and data, implementing disaster recovery solutions, testing and validating the solutions, and regularly monitoring and updating them.

Reasons we have Disaster Recovery

Natural disasters
Cyber attacks
Human errors
Equipment failures
Power outages

How does DR works?

Planning: The organization evaluates its systems, applications, and data to identify potential threats and risks that may cause disruption. It sets up business continuity and disaster recovery plans that define the roles and responsibilities of the team members and processes to follow.
Backup and recovery: The backup and recovery process involves duplicating and storing data and system configurations in an alternate location, separate from the primary systems. This is typically done using various technologies like backups, snapshots, and replication.
Testing: Periodic testing of the DR plan is crucial to ensure its effectiveness. Organizations often simulate critical events to check if the DR plan works as expected and to make changes if required.
Activation: If a disaster strikes and organizations need to implement DR, they will activate the DR plan. This is where the teams assigned in the plan take action to execute the necessary steps and restore the services.
Restoration: In this final phase, the organization reinstates the replicated data, configurations, and applications to the primary or substitute systems. The objective is to return the organization’s operations to normal operations as quickly as possible.