Disaster Recovery Research Paper

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is a process you can implement to recover information systems and data in the event of a disaster. Disasters can be either man-made such as a fire or technical such as a two disk failure in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) 5 array. If Cork University Hospital are considering transferring both their staff and patient records to the cloud, this would require a complete implementation of a disaster recovery plan. The planning involves the correct selection of a strategy to aid recover valuable data applying to both staff and patients. The selection of the appropriate discover recovery strategy depends on the business requirements of Cork University Hospital.

Cloud back-up is an approach for backing

Thus, reducing the amount of backups required. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum duration of time after a disaster, for an organisation to recover data from backup storage to resume regular operations. Reducing RTO time involves positioning secondary data so it can be easily accessible in the event of a disaster. [1]

Planning and Strategy

Planning a disaster recovery strategy minimises the negative effects to an organisations operations for recovering disrupted systems and networks. A risk assessments can be performed to analyse applications and data. This enables the organisation to prioritise the most important and crucial facets of the organisation that they can’t afford to lose. The individuals that should be involved in a risk assessment include:

• An accountant to quantify the risk numerically with relevant probabilities multiplied by the expected impact.

• Database administrator and technical people in the department.

• All heads of department that will be directly impacted by a

DR testing is often overlooked in organisations as creating a plan for disaster recovery can tie up additional resources, this is seen as a viable solution once created that does not require ongoing testing. Tests provide an organisation with a basis to identify problems or areas that require improvements or replacement if necessary. Communications, data recovery and applications are typically a focus of all disaster recovery testing. DR tests should be performed regularly throughout the year and should be incorporated into all planned maintenance. Audit logs can be analysed furthermore to determine what worked as expected, what didn’t work as expected, what changes are required and what tasks need to be re-tested. [2]

CUH should consider virtualisation as their disaster recovery solution. Virtualisation is a critical component of a DR plan which improves flexibility by reducing downtime, computing resources and reducing cost. Virtualisation provides replication of data for the entire data centre, which can be accessed easily and efficiently if necessary. Server virtualisation provides quicker recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RT) that align to the business