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Key IT disaster recovery challenges and 5 ways to overcome them

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Key IT disaster recovery challenges and 5 ways to overcome them

Vulnerability in the virtual world

Businesses are becoming more and more reliant on IT systems for their business operations and processes. With ongoing advancements and breakthroughs in technology, it’s no wonder so many organizations utilize IT as a modern business solution. It appears to provide a stable and functional foundation that businesses can build upon and optimize to meet their individual needs and streamline drawn-out processes.

However, this technology isn’t always as sturdy as we expect. Businesses face a growing list of recent issues which can lead to company-wide system failure. If not handled effectively, these events can result in extortionate expenses and major losses that have lasting effects on a company’s success. According to Uptime Institute’s 2023 Annual Outage Analysis¹, events that cause significant business disruption are becoming more expensive every year as businesses grow more dependent on digital services for corporate economic activity.

That’s why it’s essential that your business undergoes thorough preparation and planning to ensure you’re able to recover quickly when faced with a disaster.

IT disaster recovery (DR)

IT disaster recovery is the process an organization must undertake to return to standard business operations in the event of a large-scale technology-related disruption. IT systems can go down unexpectedly at any time, which can have a severe, detrimental impact on businesses, especially those that haven’t prepared and tested for these circumstances.

There are many incidents that draw businesses to a halt. The most common causes of these IT-related disasters include:

Natural catastrophes
On-premises fires
Cyber attacks
Human error
Power outages
Internet outages
Data center issues
Hardware failures
System incompatibilities

When forming an IT DR plan, it’s imperative that you consider all the ways a disaster can arise to know the best approach to fast recovery. For the best results, you should:

Form an expert team that understands your complex systems inside and out
Integrate software that connects teams for optimized communication
Lay out clear goals for your recovery by setting realistic recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)

However, IT disaster recovery is much easier said than done. Before you form complex DR strategies, let’s first assess the challenges.

IT disaster recovery challenges

1) Disasters are inevitable

No matter how many advanced measures you put inplace to avoid disasters and outages, the unfortunate truth is that they are completely unavoidable. Every organization is inevitably going to face disaster, regardless of how large or small it may be. There are simply too many external factors that lead to business disruption, and customers and clients aren’t particularly forgiving when these threats arise either. To minimize the impact of IT disasters and reduce downtime, it’s key to make sure that you not only implement preventive measures but also master your disaster recovery strategy.

2) The complexity of IT environments

From an IT perspective, a real challenge of disaster recovery is being able to meet the varying requirements of different architectures, software and applications with the resources you have. To implement a robust DR strategy that provides specific solutions for your individual systems, and respond to incidents with speed and efficiency, you’ll need advanced technical knowledge from experts who are familiar with your systems and processes.

A qualified and skilled team of IT professionals will be well-versed in your specific infrastructure and know what data to protect and how to protect it. If you provide the team with DR plans and allow them to detail and refine the strategy as they see fit, you’ll be more likely to achieve strong recovery time actual (RTA) results. This, alongside frequent recovery testing, will promote the best outcomes from your IT team.

3) Maintaining an up-to-date strategy

Cyber attacks are one of the most significant threats, with 91% of businesses experiencing breaches over the past year in Europe alone, per Databasix², and they’re only getting more sophisticated. Cyber threat actors are developing new, subtle ways to target your business with malicious intent and the impact of their infiltration can be much larger than that of generic system malfunctions.

Attacks can manifest in standard tactics, like malware injection or phishing scams, to advanced strategies, such as supply chain attacks where hackers obtain third-party permissions. To stay on top of these threats as much as you can, it’s important to revisit your DR strategy periodically to research and identify new risks, acquire the relevant resources to combat these threats and address any areas that require strengthening.

4) Ensuring compliance

It can be difficult to stay updated with the many local regulations that apply to your technology resilience procedures to ensure your business complies with legal requirements. For example, European Supervisory Authorities recently enforced the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). This is a regulatory framework that mandates that all financial services firms in the EU ensure they can withstand, respond and recover from all types of IT-related disruption for data protection purposes.

Other IT-related compliance frameworks include:

Monetary Authority of Singapore
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Policy Statement 21/3
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
National Futures Association (NFA) Compliance Rule 2-38
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GBLA)
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

To help with this, Cutover’s Collaborative Automation platform supports financial service entities to ensure regulatory compliance for IT operational resilience procedures with dynamic, automated runbooks, reporting, and auditing capabilities. You’ll be able to maintain enhanced operational excellence that meets local regulatory standards without the hassle.

5) System downtime and recovery costs

When a disaster occurs, recovery costs are inevitable. Every minute your systems are down is a minute where sales aren’t generated and operations aren’t functional — directly contributing to lost revenue and productivity. But these aren’t the only factors that affect downtime costs. Downtime can vary depending on:

Organization size
Industry vertical
Business model
Time of outage

Additionally, downtime can lead to further loss down the line. If your organization experiences a disaster, it’s likely that your employees will have to work harder to subside the effects following the incident. This can directly lead to resource attrition, in which members of staff dismiss their current duties to fulfill another position elsewhere. This challenge is difficult to bounce back from — not only are there targets to meet, but there’s a brand reputation to uphold. It may take a long time to recover from damaged stakeholder views of your company.

A great way to minimize the effects of system downtime is to implement a failover plan. Failover is the process of transferring critical data and workloads from your primary data center to an off-site secondary data center to ensure business continuity when disaster strikes. In some cases, failover involves an infrastructure shift, in which hardware systems divert to cloud-based systems to avoid physical risk factors. Implementing a failover plan in your DR strategy will allow critical operations to continue and mitigate lost productivity and revenue.

Strategic IT disaster recovery challenges

1) Resource allocation

To support operational services and streamline the recovery process, resources, such as hardware, software, personnel and facilities, must be distributed fairly and efficiently. It’s difficult to predetermine what resources are required and where to restore your IT systems. You must also budget appropriately to ensure there are enough tools available when required. It’s important to remember that priorities may change during the recovery process, so resources should also be accessible, flexible and adaptable.

As a critical component of disaster recovery planning, resource allocation should be coordinated and communicated across business executives, IT DR teams, and other stakeholders to make sure that everyone is aware of the necessary tools needed to resume standard operations. It may also be beneficial to outsource components of your disaster recovery process so you have access to a vast variety of resources and expertise.

2) Regular testing

Although testing against disaster is important to businesses, it can be a time-consuming and disruptive process. According to Information Age statistics³, 41%of companies have either failed to test their disaster recovery systems in the last six months or couldn’t say when the last testing took place. Additionally, it takes more than four weeks to plan and test for a single scenario, on average. For some, it can take over 12 weeks to go through the planning and testing process, per Cutover’s Survey⁴. However, these efforts achieve significant results with only 2% of survey respondents say they rarely meet their RTO.

Despite the large amount of time and effort required, it’s crucial to conduct regular disaster recovery planning and testing to directly combat downtime and save money in the long run. It’s a noteworthy investment, but one you can count on. Take time to research available tools that help you achieve operational excellence with DR support to make this process as pain-free as possible. For quality practice, Cutover’s SaaS platform helps simulate realistic disasters that your company may face. You’ll be able to rehearse resilience testing sequences to optimize recovery.

Recovery execution challenges

1) Meeting your recovery time objective

The goal of an RTO is to cut system downtime as much as possible. For many organizations, meeting an RTO can be a significant challenge. In the disaster recovery process, businesses must identify critical applications and data, and ensure data backups are accessible. But, if you have an increasing variety of data to backup, such as unstructured or semi-structured data, you may struggle to organize this effectively.

Cluttered data causes unwanted delays in your DR recovery. To meet your RTOs, you’ll need to strategize and document your data storage for fast identification. With regular DR testing, you can define your RPO, assess your RTA and gain valuable insight into there sources and methods required to enhance your recovery speed.

2) Errors mid-recovery

If your recovery processes are manual, it’s up to your team of IT professionals to handle the DR process. This creates room for human error, which increases the potential for error to arise mid-recovery. If you lack regular and realistic DR testing to familiarize your team with incidents, errors in mid-recovery are even more likely to occur.

To reduce the chances of errors, consider integrating software that enables you to build detailed, dynamic automated runbooks to automate your recovery process. This minimizes the risk of errors and speeds up the recovery process for reduced downtime costs.

3) Visibility of problems and severity levels

There are many visibility issues that can hinder an organization’s ability to handle a disaster effectively. This includes:

Lack of real-time visibility
Ineffective monitoring and notifying
Limited access to critical data
Poor communication

Sometimes, there are so many employees and systems involved in disaster recovery that it’s difficult to maintain an awareness of the current recovery status. To combat this issue, try implementing a monitoring and reporting system to enhance communication and gain real-time information on the stage of recovery.

Best practices for disaster preparation

Your organization requires extensive preparation to ensure it’s protected from disaster. It’s essential you don’t cut corners or take shortcuts. Instead, undergo all the necessary steps and avoid overestimating the effectiveness of your DR strategy, as many organizations have suffered from this simple mistake.

According to a Gartner survey⁵, 86% of operation leaders claimed their recovery capabilities exceeded CIO expectations. However, only 27% of that group undertook the three most basic steps expected of a DR program. Even if systems appear successful in their outcome, you need to guarantee that your strategy works when faced with a genuine crisis.

When preparing and perfecting your disaster recovery strategy, follow these key practices:

1) Find gaps in your current systems

If you have a DR strategy in place, carefully evaluate the human and technical gaps that may appear when moving operations from the primary to the secondary site. Ask yourself: Will the failover strategy work within the necessary time frame? How can you confirm this? Use tests and historical data to identify these potential issues.

2) Consider the various scenarios

It’s possible that your scope might be too narrow. Real-world events are more subtle and complex than we like to admit, so try to consider scenarios like a hard disk failure on a database server. It’s good to think outside the box with your testing methods. For example, would it be more beneficial to undergo a completely unannounced test to assess the realistic results of your DR strategy?

3) Determine your test frequency

Some may view testing as a hassle and plenty of organizations only test their data center once a year. It’s important to test regularly enough that your teams are familiarized with the process and can act fast if an issue were to arise. Test a comfortable amount to ensure you’re prepared without causing regular disruption to your systems.

4) Learn from your mistakes

Once you undergo testing, there are bound to be a few cracks that need filling in. Try to revisit your DR plans and assess what you could have done differently. Did major issues arise, or do you need to focus on smaller problems? How were your timings? Compare your RTA to your RTO to evaluate your performance. Cutover’s automated system of record can identify areas of improvement to help you reduce recovery time.

5) Optimize communication methods

Ensure there is a way for everyone in your team to communicate when a disaster occurs. You should store plans centrally, so it’s visible to all relevant parties and actionable. This enables you to react fast and recover quickly. Cutover’s Collaborative Automation platform offers the perfect solution by providing your entire team with the information they need to make decisions and react, communicate, and collaborate effectively in a short time-frame.

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IT DR events are unavoidable, it’s only a matter of when they’ll strike. That’s why solid disaster recovery planning needs to take place, so you can guarantee your systems are reliable and your teams are well-versed in the art of recovery.

Let's get planning

With solid IT DR plans and regular testing, you can minimize the effects of disaster and save on costs associated with them. There will always be ways to build, update and improve your recovery strategies. That’s why it’s important to consider implementing software solutions that optimize your DR processes.

Whether you manage your IT resources through a virtual machine, cloud infrastructure or on-site datacenter, Cutover’s Collaborative Automation platform can improve communication among your teams, applications and technology.

With Cutover, you can host multi-team and technology recovery plans, perform planned and unplanned DR tests and gain visibility into execution analytics and audit logs. Our advanced services have helped thousands of companies worldwide and are trusted by world-leading financial institutions.

“When a change event takes place, the runbook is played through and hundreds of individuals can follow the operation as it progresses, allowing them to coordinate via Cutover chat/mobile app. Managers maintain a bird’s-eye view of progress and IT staff can better see what’s required of them.”

- CIO, Top Global Bank

Don’t just survive disasters, thrive in disasters. Getin touch with Cutover to optimize your recovery strategies today.