8 Tips To Implement an Effective Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery minimizes data loss and enables the quick recovery of business operations. Disaster recovery planning on day 0 will ensure an application’s success in day 2 production environment, discusses, Catherine Southard, VP of engineering, D2iQ. 

Disaster recovery is a priority across almost every industry. No matter what an organization does, both natural and man-made crises can happen at any moment. 

Running smoothly and scaling effortlessly in day 2 production environments is the ultimate goal for modern cloud-native applications. Day 2 production is the phase of the development lifecycle, after initial deployment, where the real application demands exist. Challenges are frequent, and complexity is heightened as developers modify IT stacks and add applications to keep pace with business goals and growth. However, as an organization grows, experiencing disaster is all but guaranteed. From cyberattacks, to natural disasters, to overnight digital transformation due to a worldwide pandemic, developers must be prepared for anything. 

The best process for planning for any potential crisis is to ensure that disaster recovery plans are in place on day 0. If a disaster strikes, teams are prepared to align the business and ensure a smooth recovery process. As applications are designed on day 0, one of the most vital steps to ensuring future success is laying the groundwork for a disaster recovery plan that accounts for every phase of development. While teams hope never to need these contingencies, ensuring a strong foundation early on and maintaining it throughout the development process mitigates risk and speeds up the shift to day 2.  

See More: How Disaster Recovery In The Cloud Reduces Your Risk: It’s About Time

Tips for Successful Disaster Recovery Plan

In order to do this effectively, teams and applications must be mission-built with these protocols in place. Top tips to ensure a successful disaster recovery process include: 

1. Identifying and documenting internal processes for managing the downtime. This will be different for every team, but the common theme is to have a plan. Teams should create a process for communicating the change to customers well in advance to ensure they can adapt successfully if a problem does arise.
2. As with anything you want to master, practice practice practice. While it’s unlikely that a team will be able to run through an exact scenario that will occur, practice drills for various issues will help make disaster recovery processes less daunting and ensure the right steps are in place ahead of time. 
3. Create a runbook for the worst-case scenario. This should include the name of owners from various teams who can obtain the data necessary for troubleshooting, work on the fix itself depending on the part of the system that’s down, and liaise with customers to keep them updated on the situation as it progresses. 
4. Ensure patch release processes are well-defined. This way, teams can patch systems or roll a fix out to customers as easily as possible when needed. 
5. Consider your customers’ nonfunctional requirements. Thinking through scale and system availability in advance when designing and testing your solution will help ensure that all aspects of the application are accounted for, not just the obvious ones. 
6. Run periodic drills. Organizations must be prepared at a moment’s notice, and failure simulations allow teams to further optimize their runbook for a variety of scenarios. 
7. Never waste a good crisis. After disaster recovery is complete, organizations should run a post-mortem analysis to identify what worked well and where they should adjust.
8. Create a full inventory of software versions and configurations. This will prevent organizations from experiencing further issues when trying to bring their systems back online and prolong crises. 

See More: What IT Gets Wrong in Their Disaster Recovery Plans

Closing Thoughts

Day 2 operations occur when applications are fully functional and delivering on their intended goals. Application development is a difficult process and when plans are not in place for effective crisis management, day 2 operations can be difficult to achieve. In fact, 40% of applicationsOpens a new window do not make it into day 2 production. And almost all (95%) organizations that use cloud-native technology have run into challenges, most commonly during the development phase (47%). 

Disaster recovery planning at the start of the application development process is one of the most important steps an organization can take to ensure continuity and long-term success. No matter the industry, crises are inevitable. However, proper planning and preparation make them manageable. In order for applications to have the best chance at day 2 operations, plans must be in place to continue operations through a variety of challenges.

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