Businesses are critically reliant upon IT systems, which can inflict significant financial harm when they go down. The potential causes of downtime include lost or corrupted files, application failure due to a software virus, server hardware malfunction, temporary power outage, or a natural disaster that takes out an entire facility.
For decades, IT managers have protected their infrastructures using a combination of preventive measures (e.g., backup power systems, off-site data storage, antivirus software) and recovery and restoration activities (e.g., redundant hardware and networks) to bring IT systems back to normal operation as quickly as possible. As companies grow and update their IT infrastructure, different tactics are employed to ensure the critical systems and applications used to run the business are always available. Such tactics are based on business needs, budget, size of the IT department, regulatory requirements, and more. Seldom will two companies in the same industry and of the same size have the same disaster recovery architecture, as it relates to technology, overall DR plans, and processes.
