Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery: getting back to working
Backup answers whether a copy exists. Disaster recovery answers how long it takes to be working again, and who does what while the clock runs.
What disaster recovery covers
Disaster recovery is the part of the plan that begins after something has already gone wrong. It is concerned with sequence and time: which systems come back first, where they come back to, who is authorised to make the call, and how long each step takes. EnterProtect approaches it through BCDR, which pairs the recovery points with the procedure for using them, and through Vault, which holds the copies in storage that a compromise of your environment does not reach. The archive below collects incidents where the recovery, rather than the intrusion, was the story.
Read next
Incidents and background from our archive.
CDK Global dealership outage
Weeks of manual process after one supplier went down.
Dish Network ransomware outage
A public company operating without its own systems.
988 Lifeline outage
An attack on a supplier interrupting an emergency service.
Common questions
How is disaster recovery different from backup?
Backup is the copy. Disaster recovery is the plan for using it: the order systems return in, the destination they return to, the person who decides, and the time each step takes. A backup with no rehearsed procedure is a copy you will be reading documentation about during an outage.
What are RTO and RPO?
Recovery time objective is how long you intend to be down. Recovery point objective is how much recent work you accept losing. They are decisions about cost rather than technical settings, and they are worth making deliberately before an incident rather than discovering afterwards.
Can we test it without disrupting anything?
Yes. A walkthrough runs the triage and the restore against a scenario you bring, and the evidence it produces is yours whether or not you continue.
See it against your own environment
Bring a real scenario to the walkthrough. You keep the evidence it produces.