Disaster recovery - Definition and Overview

Disaster Recovery in information technology is the ability of an infrastructure to restart operations after a disaster. While many of today's larger computer systems contain built-in programs for disaster recovery, standalone recovery programs like FirstDefense-ISR often provide enhanced features. Disaster Recovery is used both in the context of data loss prevention and data recovery.

There are two primary metrics to demonstrate recoverability following failure:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in time that the restarted infrastructure will reflect. Essentially, this is the roll-back that will be experienced as a result of the recovery. Reducing RPO requires increasing synchronicity of data replication.

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time that will pass before an infrastructure is available. Reducing RTO requires data to be online and available at a failover site.

When critical data loss occurs without a preventive disaster recovery policy in place data recovery becomes the only option.

External links

• Disaster Recovery World (http://www.disasterrecoveryworld.com), a resource and directory dedicated to disaster recovery issues].