Disaster recovery (DR) plans are designed to restore critical systems and data after a disruption occurs, such as a natural disaster, cyberattack, or hardware failure. Industry benchmarks suggest that the recovery success rate in enterprise DR ranges between 70% to 90%. Statistics further reveal that about 20% of unplanned downtime in data centers is caused by hardware failures (Gartner). A survey conducted by Veritas stipulated that 36% of organizations experienced a failure in their disaster recovery plans due to IT system failure, including software and hardware issues. These figures indicate that technological failure is a significant factor in disaster recovery’s success rates. The exact impact depends on the organization's preparedness, infrastructure, and the specific technologies in use. We’ll explore factors that influence recovery success rate and why being prepared for one type of service in particular plays a pivotal role in enhancing success rate, especially in scenarios of storage hardware failure, lack in data backup redundancy, time constraints and data integrity issues.
Information Technology (IT) personnel in charge of managing DR knows all too well that adequate planning, sufficient testing, minimizing user error, having access to resources, being prepared for unforeseen circumstances while keeping an eye on continuous improvement could imply the difference between total chaos and the best possible success outcome during a DR execution. How does an organization even prepare for back up hardware failures? Backup hardware, such as servers or storage devices, can fail during DR, preventing data restoration. Software used in a DR process might have bugs or incompatibilities that weren't discovered during testing. When this happens, having capabilities to perform data recovery from the original storage media is a business-saving effort. Being proactive for unforeseen circumstances means knowing in advance who your data recovery service partner is before you need their assistance. This is important because you wouldn’t want to use up more time searching for a qualified partner the moment you need them. In addition, unless you have an unlimited DR budget, it might be beneficial to be able to forecast for a fixed budget so that resources can be planned accordingly. If vetting out the right data recovery service provider is a daunting task for you, look beyond expert skillsets by confidently selecting a company that provides fair pricing. This indicates a fixed price for data recovery service as opposed to an escalating pricing scheme that depends on the evaluation of each drive in your RAID array. Fair pricing also suggests that the company is willing to give its customers a full refund for unsuccessful data recovery attempts per drive. ATP Data Services (www.atpdataservices.com) for example, deeply understand its customers’ needs as it already serves a wide range of customers across industries, recovering data from any brand of storage technology.
In conclusion, DR is complex and challenging. There are scenarios when performing data recovery from the original storage media proves to be the last resort to remedy the situation:
Backups are corrupted or incomplete, resulting in failure of the DR effort
Outdated backup data creates gaps that are detrimental to data users
Unforeseen circumstances in storage hardware or software failures
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) misalignment, in other words when the time required to restore systems and data might exceed the organization's acceptable recovery time objectives
With the ever-evolving threat landscape and new types of cyber attacks, it’s difficult to ensure enterprises' DR plans are as tight as possible. For that reason, we encourage IT organizations to incorporate in their plan the information of a dedicated data recovery service partner who is ready to roll up their sleeves to perform data recovery from the original storage media should the requirement swiftly arise.