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What is Disaster Recovery?
Quick answer
The plans, tools, and processes an organization uses to restore its IT systems and data after a major outage, attack, or disaster.
Disaster Recovery, explained
Disaster recovery, often shortened to DR, focuses on getting technology running again after events such as hardware failure, ransomware, fire, flooding, or a cloud region outage. Two common targets guide planning: the recovery time objective, which is how quickly systems must be back, and the recovery point objective, which is how much recent data the business can afford to lose.
For example, an accounting firm might decide its client database must be restored within four hours with no more than one hour of lost data, then design backups and a standby environment to meet that. Disaster recovery is part of broader business continuity planning. Plans only work if they are tested; many organizations discover during a real incident that backups are incomplete or restore steps are unclear.
Related terms
Business Continuity Plan
A documented plan for keeping essential business operations running during and after a disruption such as an outage, disaster, or cyberattack.
Cloud BackupCopying data from computers, servers, or applications to storage run by a cloud provider so it can be restored if the original is lost.
RansomwareMalware that encrypts or steals a victim's files and demands payment, usually in cryptocurrency, to restore access or prevent leaks.
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