December 4, 2019 | By Greg Dougherty
Is your business ready for the worst outcomes of a ransomware outbreak? Technology and cybersecurity experts, as well as government officials worldwide, constantly remind us about the dangers associated with malware, from critical data loss to business operations disruption and reputational harm. With the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks, organizations are seeking disaster recovery strategies that are best suited for business resilience.
On December 4th, 2019, Sagi Brody (Chief Technology Officer, Opti9) was joined by Danny Allan (Chief Technology Officer, Veeam) and Phil Shih (Managing Director, Structure Research) for our webinar on how you can leverage a mature disaster recovery strategy to proactively mitigate and prevent cyberattacks.
To ensure that your organization is well-equipped to combat cyberattacks, you first need to make sure that you have a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy in place. So, what exactly needs to be done to ensure your disaster recovery strategy is fully inclusive?
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- Full CoverageWhen it comes to your DR strategy, you need to cover all of your critical components, including legacy platforms. It’s crucial that you have 100% coverage of what you and your team consider to be a part of your critical platforms in your production environment. It’s no question that there is a variety of software out there to replicate virtual machines. However, no single data mover can account for all your critical platforms such as storage directly attached to VMs, physical servers, NAS, and IBM platforms. Instead of looking for a single piece of software to own DR, you need to find a holistic provider who matches best in software per use-case.
- Application-Aware NetworkingIn order for a DR strategy to be successful, users must have the ability to consume applications there in the same way they do at production. This means no IP, DNS, or messy network changes. Instead, look to software-defined network and security tools to empower policy-based workload mobility as part of your strategy.
- Keep Failover, Failback, and Testing In MindIt’s crucial that you understand what type of events you’re looking to protect against with your disaster recovery strategy. Are you looking to protect against a full physical site outage only? A per application failover capability? Or maybe an active/active configuration? If you’re not sure, start with the first and adopt a phased approach. Likewise, you need to determine who is responsible DR testing, how often should testing be done, and how do you define what success looks like for those tests. You also need to ensure network access to the test environment is straightforward and easy to enable (see “Application-Aware Networking”). Additionally, don’t ignore the failback procedure. Specifically, what type of connectivity exists between production and DR? How much time would it take to reverse replicate a few days’ worth of change data?
- Runbook ImplementationAs we just mentioned, reporting and defining success are extremely important when it comes to DR, and this is where a runbook comes in. One of the most important pieces of documentation for disaster recovery, a runbook puts all procedures and protocols down in writing so that all stakeholders know exactly how aspects of the disaster recovery plan are handled such as testing, failover, and failback. When it comes to your runbook, you need to know who owns the runbook and takes responsibility for updating and maintaining it. This could be an internal team member if your DR strategy is in-house, or a DRaaS provider if you outsource your disaster recovery. It’s also important to know the following: what exactly does the runbook cover, and are the procedures being followed?